Agent Structure Problem of Constructivism

Max Weber: actors are free individuals makes accumulative actions forming into a society
- Bottom up approach: we look at individual level to understand the upper levels (state & int.)
Emile Durkheim: how members of society is socialied into the social system
- Actors are structured according to the social rules that exist
- Up Down approach: social structure determines and shape actors in them
The debate is heged or solved by third ‘structuration’ approach: Anthony Giddens
- Neither bottom-up or top-down
- Actors are shaped by social structures
- Actors also have some autonomy in shaping the social structures as well
- It’s a continuous dynamic $Agent ⇆ Structure$
Different types of constructivism
- US’s: using material theories of traditional IRTs then using Constructivism assumptions to facilitate in understanding how those ideas affect the traditional understanding
  - Liberalism + Values, norms, & identities
  - Realism + Values, norms, & identities
- Europe: its more critical constructivism
  - Closer to Post-Structuralism or Post-Modernism: criticizing IR for being to rational on its outlooks, and epistemology of it

Different schools of IR

Norms Analysis: focus on how norms evolves and changes over time
- Led by Martha Finnemore
- Life Cycle of Norms: emergence, cascade, internalization: human rights
Mainstream (social) Constructivism: focus on the role of social structures in political settings
- Led by Alexander Wendt
- ‘Social Facts’: socially constructed/agreed-upon meanings/values to meaningless things (Money, Security, Sovereignty)
  - They can change due to world context: after 9 11, ‘freedom fighters’ became ‘terrorists’
- Anarchy is what States Make of it (1991)
  - It seeks to be a middle ground: mixes to one coherent whole
    - material & rationalistic aspects (Positivism) + culture & identity (Post-Positivism)
  💡 Anarchy exist but we can construct it into something with different effects
Critical Constructivism: not part of, but everything is socially constructed
- Distinction between ‘self’ and ‘others’
  
  💡 Ex: Western think of themselves as rational, peaceful, civilized as compared to Islam
- Nicholas Onuf: the world is a thing we made.
  - When we naturalize speaking world order as anarchy, it becomes anarchic

Is social constructivism a theory?
If material things doesn’t matter and everything is a social construct, what form should IR take?