Social Constructitvism Flashcards
Which two factors, according to Wendt, represent the core of constructivism?
Idealism and holism.
What does a constructivist mean by idealism? And how does Idealism relate to materialism?
Ideas shape world politics. But it is not ideas is not the same as beliefs in our heads or psychological states in our mind.
These ideas are social. Maps that are shaped by collectively held ideas such as knowledge, symbols, language, and rules.
These ideas shapes the material reality, and not the other way around.
What is materialism?
Materialism is the view that the structure that constrains behaviour is defined by the distribution of power, technology, and geography.
What does a reconstructivist mean by holism?
The world is irreducibly and cannot be decomposed into the properties of already existing actors. Holism allows for agency, recognizing that agents have some autonomy and their interactions help to construct, reproduce, and transform those structures.
What fundamentally drives an actor, according to a social constructivist?
Actors are not born outside of and prior to society, as individualism claims. Actors are produced and created by their cultural environment: nurture, not nature.
The American identity shapes national interests and even what are considered to be acceptable and unacceptable means to achieve them.
What knowledge does a Constructivist use when interpreting reality, the world around him?
Reality does not exist out there waiting to be discovered; instead, historically produced and culturally bound knowledge enables individuals to construct and give meaning to reality.
In other words, existing categories help us to understand, define, and make sense of the world.
Ex. Many ways to understand collective violence.
What are social facts? Is there any such thing as an objective reality?
Social facts are things dependent on human agreement. Money, refugees, terrorism, human rights, and sovereignty are social facts. They will only exist so long as that agreement endures, and their existence shapes how we categorize the world and what we do.
Brute facts like rocks, flowers and gravity are objective facts.
What are practices in the language of a constructivist?
Practices are an attempt to capture how things are done, to situate these ‘doings’ within a social context.
Adler and Pouliot define practices as ‘socially meaningful patterns of action which, in being performed more or less competently’ serve to produce and reproduce background knowledge and discourse..
For instance, humanitarian organizations that provide life-saving relief to victims of conflict and natural disasters have a set of clear practices: there are right and wrong ways to deliver relief (ideally through principles of impartiality, independence, and neutrality); these practices are learned by doing, through networks of professionals, and training; providing relief according to the humanitarian sectors standards is a way of demonstrating not just competence but also membership in the community; and these practices often connote ethical commitments to
What two basic varieties does norm come in?
Regulative rules and Constitutive rules.
Regulative rules regulate already existing activities - rules for the road instruct how to drive; the World Trade Organization’s rules regulate trade.
Constitutive Rules create the very possibility for these activities. The rules of sovereignty not only regulate state practices but also make possible the very idea of a sovereign state.
Norms also vary in their institutionalization, how much they are taken for granted.
Can these norms be changed?
Rules are not static, bur rather are revised through practices, reflection, and arguments by actors regarding how they should be applied to new situations.
Actors can engage in strategic social construction. Actors attempt to change the norms that subsequently guide and constitute state identities and interests.
What does Wendt’s claim that “anarchy is what states make of it” mean?
Constructivists’ claim that the world is not just material but also normative leads them to contras different kinds of world orders.
Would Mahatma Gandhis world be the same as a world of Osama bin Ladens? Wendt’s claim calls attention to how different beliefs and practices will generate divergent patterns and organization of world politics.
What does legitimacy mean in a constructivist vocabulary?
Many states want to be seen as acting with the established conventions and norms, and feel the need to explain or justify their actions when they are seen otherwise.
There is a direct relationship between their legitimacy and the costs of a course of action: the greater the legitimacy and the costs of a course of action: the greater the legitimacy, the easier time they will have convincing others to cooperate with their policies; the less legitimacy, the more costly the action.
What is the conceptual distinction between the logic of consequences and the logic of appropriateness?
The logic of consequences attributes action to the anticipated costs and benefits.
The logic of appropriateness, highlights how actors are rule-following, worrying about whether their actions are legitimate.
What does a constructivist do?
They trace the social constructions - archaeologist of the world.
They study how actors make their actions meaningful. These meanings are derived from constructed cultures.
Constructivism focus on how the world hangs together, how normative structures construct the identities and interests of actors, and how actors are rule-following..
What is responsibility to protect?
The Peace of Westphalia helped to establish sovereignty and the norm of non-interference, but in recent decades various processes have worked against the principle of non-interference and suggested how state sovereignty is conditional on how states treat their populations - best known as a responsibility to protect.
