Chapter 3 Flashcards
How do constructivists see security and world politics?
Security as a site of negotiation and world politics generally as a social realm
How do constructivsts see agents and structures
They see them as mutually constituted
Constructivists share a belief that
security is a social construction, meaning different things in different contexts
Constructivistsdraw insights from the cognate discipline of
Sociology
Arnold Wolfers’s classic definition of security
Security could be understood as the preservation of a group’s core values
Constructivists tend to avoid advancing universal an abstract definitions of security, and instead focus on
How security is given meaning in practice
Importance of “norm entrepreneurs”
Political leaders or civil society forces, in advancing a particular norm.
What is the responsibility that norm entrepreneurs have?
They build support for norms, and secure endorsement or acquiescence from power actors in the international system is crucial if ideas are to become internalized and hence genuinely shape state behaviour and interest
Finnemore and Sikkink argue that
To transition from ideas to genuine expectations of appropriate state behaviour, a norm progresses through stages of emergence, cascade and eventual internalization by actors themselves
Anje Weiner, identifies the importance of norm by
Contestation, suggesting that one of the key challenges facing the development of a norm is competing conceptions across states regarding what norms actually mean, and what behaviour might be expected
Sarah Percy definition of norm is
The failure to follow up the development of a norm with effective international law can mean a gap between what is seen as legitimate and what is ultimately codified
Alexander Betts and Phil Orchard approach to norms
Norms may stall at the point of domestic implementation
While all constructivists share a belief in the centrality of identity politics in the construction of security, there are
different strands of construcitivism see the relationship between identity and security quite differently.
