Abu Aardvark

Ducks Debate Constructivism

The Duck of Minerva has taken up my "constructivism won" thesis, and has sparked one of the most interesting blog debates on constructivism ever.  Okay, maybe the only blog debate of constructivism ever, but it's really interesting.  [warning:  another long IR theory post follows.  Read at your own risk.]

Dan Nexon kicked off with some very provocative and interesting questions about the relationship between realism, liberalism (IR version), and constructivism:

First, is "neoconservativism" a conservative variant of constructivism? It would seem to follow (and I think this summarizes Marc's position well) that academic constructivism is liberal. Although the two positions are not exclusive, Marc's reading provides a different perspective than the standard view of neoconservativism as "Wilsonsian with teeth," i.e., a "neo-Reganite" synthesis of Wilsonsian idealism with a more hard-headed recognition of the importance of, and transformative potential of, military force.
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Contemporary mainline constructivism (as opposed to, say "critical" constructivisms) does seem to be a variant of liberal theory. One could argue that "constructivism," in its present form, takes up the "sociological" dimensions of liberal idealism, while "liberalism" represents the rationalist and economistic trajectory of the liberal-idealist worldview.

I would disagree with the idea that academic constructivism is politically liberal.  As I argued ad nauseum at our recent constructivism workshop, it is very important that constructivism not be construed as a "liberals club" where everyone agrees on the basic normative and political preferences.  After all, the whole point of constructivism is that such preferences, identities, and normative positions are constructed through political, rhetorical, or [fill in the blank] means.  Granted, in practice constructivists often take up issues such as global civil society, norms against various bad things, human rights, and so forth - but that there is absolutely nothing inherent to constructivist theory that requires it to be politically liberal.   

Constructivism should have a lot to say about how to create a norm against terrorism, or about how civilizational identities create conflict, how to legitimize American hegemony, or other politically conservative issues. It should equally have a lot to say about how religion matters in politics, whether that is Christianity or Islam (although to date it regrettably hasn't).   Constructivism as a paradigm should be neutral as to the content of the norms, identities and values being contested, constructed, defended, internalized, and so forth.   Hence, Osama bin Laden should be seen as a constructivist in practice:  in his political practice, ideas have power independent of material resources, and the goal is the construction of an overarching Muslim identity transcending state boundaries.  It shouldn't matter for a constructivist analysis of al-Qaeda that his goals are the antithesis of liberalism. 

Then Rodger Payne jumped in, denying that his form of critical theory could be called liberal, or post-structuralist.  He defends a Habermas-based "critical constructivism."  Which sends commenters into a flurry, because IR syllabi now conventionally divide constructivism into maintream constructivism (of the sort that I do, analyzing causal arguments about the relationships among identities, interests, discourse, norms, and so forth) and "critical" constructivism (which encompasses much of the post-structuralist strand of IR theory).

Patrick Jackson then responded with a denunciation of Habermas, defending a different version of critical constructivism.  He argued for his version of "rhetorical coercion", which would render Habermasian communicative action impossible (sorry about that sentence, folks, but that's what happens when IR folks talk among themselves).  I think Patrick's argument is too strong here:  rhetorical coercion happens some times, but communicative action happens at other times.  Why insist that only one logic is always operative?  Isn't that an empirical question?   My Iraq sanctions paper deals with exactly this point - the impact of deceptive or coercive rhetorical action on the possibility for real communicative exchange (short answer:  useful in the short term tactically, devastating in the longer term). 

Meanwhile, the commenting chorus bemoans the implacable advance of constructivism in the field, describing it as a Borg, incorporating everything it encounters, against which resistance is futile. 

I admit to being a bit fatigued by attempts to define constructivism, to set boundaries on what counts as what kind of constructivism or what gets to be called "critical." I don't much care - I'm more interested in trying to answer interesting questions, using whatever methods are available, than I am in defending any particular paradigm.  What they (and all constructivists, and IR theorists) need to do is to make these theoretical approaches relevant, to show how they can be applied to real world issues and provide better answers to tough empirical, normative, or political questions.  It sounds like the Duck authors are doing that, so more power to them.  Either way, I'm delighted to see them take up my provocation and run with it -  there should be more of this kind of discussion about IR theory on blogs.

Quack.   

APSA 2005

I'm off soon to Washington for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association - blogging will resume on Tuesday, probably. 

I'm on two panels.  The first is a panel with papers from a forthcoming book, Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, edited by Peter Katzenstein and Bob Keohane.  My chapter, which I've been working extremely hard on for the last few months but haven't mentioned on the blog, is on "Anti-Americanisms in Arab Politics." Other papers on the panel, along with mine and Katzenstein/Keohane's, are by Giaccamo Chiozza (statistical analysis of public opinion surveys), and Sophie Meniuer (France);  the discussants are Henry Nau and John Ruggie.  Stephen Krasner was supposed to be a discussant, but he's too busy being the head of Policy Planning at State Department right now.   It's Friday at 2:00, for those APSA member readers who might be interested in this sort of thing.

I'm also on a roundtable on "Democracy and Democracy Promotion in the Middle East."  Other paticipants include Dalia Kaye (who organized the panel), Mark Tessler, Amr Hamzawy, Nathan Brown, and Risa Brooks.  Sounds like a good lineup, and should be an entertaining discussion.  That's Saturday at 2:00, again for those of you who might care.

I don't tend to go to many panels at APSA, or other conferences (coffee shops before noon, bars thereafter are more my thing, or used to be before the kids...).  But if I did, here are some other panels which look especially interesting to me. 

"The End of the Bush Revolution?  Democratization, Unilateralism, and Pre-emption in American Foreign Policy", with John Ikenberry, Francis Fukuyama, Jeff Legro, John Mearsheimer, and Joe Grieco.  Of course they scheduled that opposite my anti-Americanism panel, so I definitely won't be seeing that one. 

"Democracy Imposed?  The Prospects for Democracy in the Middle East."  With Larry Diamond, Lisa Anderson, Daniel Brumberg, and Elliott Abrams (yes, that Elliott Abrams).   It's 8:00 AM Friday, so whether I attend largely depends on the previous night's activities, I suppose. 

"International Relations Theory in the Age of Global Terrorism: Is Grand Theory Dead?"  with Bob Keohane, Alex Wendt, and Ken Waltz.  Maybe a better question than "did constructivism win"... maybe even interesting enough to get me to a Friday 4:15 panel.  Giggle. 

"Offensive Realism, Global Jihadi Networks, and the Power of Preemption" with John Mearsheimer, Stephen Van Evera, John Mueller, and Robert Jervis, among others. Thursday afternoon, so I'll miss it, but sure sounds interesting.

"Roundtable: Ethnography Meets Rational Choice: The Case of David Laitin, For Example", including a paper by Ted Hopf called "Being David Laitin: the Fearon factor."  Interesting mainly because David Laitin himself doesn't appear on the roster... making one wonder whether he's a willing John Malkovich?  Jim, any insights?

Also, I'm going to be the section-chief for Division 12 next year - "Comparative Politics of the Developing World."  So, since as I understand it panels are at least partially allocated based on attendance at the previous year's conference, go to lots of Div 12 panels so that I get more panels to play with!

I'm sure there's lots more, but I've got lots to do before I leave - writing my talks, maybe? - so that's it. Feel free to meet and greet the Aardvark if you see me wandering the halls, or, um, guarding the bar from vampires. 

UPDATE:  see Dan Drezner's picks and pans, and don't miss his always useful guidebook for APSA rookies.

Bloom on suicide terrorism

Robert Pape's Dying to Win - which argues that the vast majority of suicide terrorism is used by nationalist movements fighting occupations by democracies - has received a vast amount of attention.  Curiously, another new book on the same topic has received far less:  Mia Bloom's "Dying to Kill".  (Technorati reports 567 posts about Pape, and 22 about Bloom).

I don't have the time or the inclination to offer a full scale review here - and I couldn't guarantee that such a review would be positive! -  but I would like to just highlight her basic argument, which strikes me as both more flexible and more convincing than Pape's:

Terrorist groups appear to use suicide bombing under two conditions:  when other terrorist or military tactics fail, and when they are in competition with other terrorist groups for popular or financial support.  Suicide bombing is usually found in the second stage of conflicts - and only spreads in countries where the population is receptive to terrorists targeting civilians (which has been the case in Iraq, Israel, and Chechnya, less so in Sri Lanka, and not the case in Spain or Northern Ireland).

Like Pape, she argues for a more strategic than an ideology/religous kind of explanation:

there is nothing inherently dysfunctional about the Islamic faith per se that predisposes its adherents towards violence, but increasingly groups are emulating each other's tactics ...  although the individual bombers might be inspired by several - sometimes complementary - motives, the organizations that send the bombers do so because such attacks are an effective means to intimidate and demoralize the enemy.

In addition to chapters on Palestine/Israel, Sri Lanka, and Turkey, she offers a general theory and historical overview, an interesting chapter on "transnational contagion effects", a somewhat more dubious chapter on "rape and war: engendering suicide terror", and what appears to be a hastily written conclusion which asks - nicely anticipating the debates over the London bombings - entitled: "Will Iraq cause suicide terror at home?"

What I like about her argument is its emphasis on intra-group strategic rivalry and on the importance of the wider political-cultural climate - recognizing that the groups which employ terrorism are usually fighting a two front campaign, one against their enemy and the other against political rivals on their own side.   Pape's argument strikes me as a bit too static, and an artifact of the particularities of a few cases:  yes, a lot of the suicide bombings have been used against occupying democracies, but that just says that a lot of them have taken place in Israel and Iraq, without offering a compelling logic as to why this is necessary.   Bloom's book may not be perfect - like I said, I haven't had time to really review it carefully - but she does seem to offer a more dynamic and flexible account based on some key contextual, strategic variables which would apply across a wide range of possible cases.

Walt on policy relevance

Stephen Walt has an interesting piece in the current edition of Annual Reviews of Political Science (subscription only, sorry) on the topic of the relative invisibility of International Relations theorists in the grand foreign policy debates of the day (or even the more workmanlike making of foreign policy).  He reviews a wide range of reasons, including

• IR Theory is too general and abstract, and "simply not very relevant for informing policy decisions." He levels this criticism at Realists (Waltz), constructivists (Wendt), and rationalists (Powell) alike.
• "So many theories, so little time."  Scholars have identified so many different variables, and advanced so many different models, but have spent so little time showing how they might be integrated, that the policy maker doesn't really know how to choose among them. 
• Most real foreign policy problems don't fit the structure of even the strongest academic theories:  for example, game theory is great when actor preferences are known, but in the real world they usually aren't.  In the real world, "nonlinear relationships and other systemic effects abound, and preferences and perceptions are constantly being revised."  Plus, the available data suck (okay, he didn't use that word, but that's what he meant.)
• Different agendas:  theorists want to explain general patterns, policy makers want to solve specific problems.   Theorists take as long as they need to get it right, policy makers need to act now. 
• Professionalization of the discipline.  "IR scholarship is often impenetrable to outsiders, largely because it is not intended for their consumption... Even when theorists have useful ideas to offer, the people who need them will not know they exist and would be unlikely to understand them if they did."  And the structure of the discipline encourages this - young scholars make a name for themselves by publishing articles aimed at the discipline:

Here's the money quote: 

"Prominent IR theorists rarely try to write books or articles that would be directly relevant to policy problems; policy relevance is simply not a criterion that the academy values.  Indeed, there is a clear bias against it.  Younger scholars are cautioned not to "waste" their time publishing op-eds, weblogs, or articles in general readership journals, and scholars who write for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, or even peer-reviewed journals such as Political Science Quarterly or International Security run the risk of seeming insufficiently serious, even if they also publish in more rarified academic journals."

I agree with almost everything he says, and it's been something I've thought about a lot lately. My "constructivism won" post a couple of weeks ago ended by asking why constructivist IR theorists had done relatively little in response to 9/11, given what I claimed was their intellectual and analytical victory  - Walt is in some ways asking the same question. I started my career publishing in "rarified academic journals", and I still do.  But I also write op-eds, articles in general readership journals, and - believe it or not - a weblog.  Could I have done all this before tenure, or if I taught at a research university rather than a liberal arts college?  Impossible to say, but it would have been a lot riskier. 

Walt offers some suggestions of how to fix this, which seem sensible but unlikely to change the deeply rooted norms of the profession:

• academic departments should give greater weight to real-world relevance in hiring and promotion decisions.
• give junior faculty incentives to take time off and work in government
• academic journals could place greater weight on relevance, and more outlets for such policy-relevant research could be created.

I would add to that list the suggestion that senior scholars should practice what Walt preaches.  For example, John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter - leading IR scholars - started blogging over at Josh Marshall's place - that sends a great signal to younger scholars about the legitimacy of the enterprise.  Chris Gelpi and Peter Feaver are advising the Bush administration about public opinion during wartime. 

UPDATE:  as one emailer correctly notes, and as I should have mentioned yesterday, Walt himself does practice what he preaches - he advanced, along with John Mearsheimer, the most influential Realist case against the invasion of Iraq.  I didn't mean to imply that Walt was being hypocritical - sorry for any confusion there.

IR: Constructivism v Rationalism

(Warning:  for IR geeks only)

Back in the 1990s, the International Relations subfield of Political Science was consumed by the so-called "rationalism-constructivism" debate.  Constructivism argued that mainstream Realist, Liberal, and formal modeling approaches to IR drastically under-stated the role of ideas, discourse, and identities in explaining political behavior. (*) Constructivists attempted to demonstrate that identities, ideas, and discourse mattered even in the 'heartland' of security studies (as in this influential volume edited by Peter Katzenstein, or in this volume on the Middle East edited by Mike Barnett and Shibley Telhami).   Many Realists countered that these 'soft' and 'fuzzy' factors mattered only at the margins, or in relatively insignificant areas of political life:  if ideas or moral norms mattered, it was only because of the strategic insignificance of the issue, or because the norms coincided with the interests of powerful states (as in this influential rejoinder written by Michael Desch).  While this debate was never fully resolved (are they ever?), many saw the possibility for a synthesis by using Stephen Walt's 'balance of threat' ideas, or Realist models incorporating domestic politics. 

The Realist-constructivist debate was somewhat overtaken by another, parallel debate between constructivists and "rationalists" - sometimes referring to those who analyzed international relations in formal terms, taking identities and interests as given in order to model strategic interaction, and sometimes referring more broadly to those who emphasized material power considerations (whether Realist or Liberal) over ideational or cultural variables.  That debate seemed to reach a tentative resolution with an article jointly written by the leading rationalist James Fearon and the leading constructivist Alex Wendt which basically argued that rationalism and constructivism could easily co-exist, because it was primarily a methodological distinction rather than a substantive one.  Realism and Liberalism differed substantively over the value of international institutions, or containment vs engagement strategies, or the priority of military vs economic conceptions of the national interest.... and thus offered clearly different policy advice.    Rationalism vs constructivism, by this argument, did not have such substantive differences and as such could not constitute a comparable 'Great Debate.'  Indeed, a synthesis could easily be imagined:  constructivists might explain the identities and interests of the actors, which would allow rationalists to model a specific episode of strategic interaction (see Lynch 2002, for another take on a potential rationalist-constructivist synthesis). 

Constructivism has won, at least in the security policy realm.  The key tenets of its research program have become the conventional wisdom in the public realm:  that ideologies and ideas (such as Islam) matter, that the significance of ideas can not be reduced to material power, that norms (such as a norm against terrorism) matter, that public arguments and discourse (such as Muslim condemnations of terror, or the 'war of ideas') matter.   Given that constructivism was long dismissed as too soft and fuzzy, insufficiently rigorous, and lacking in policy relevance, this has to be a surprising outcome (but see my note at the bottom of this post). 

Take al-Qaeda.  It has long since become conventional wisdom that al-Qaeda is a non-state actor (contra Realism) motivated by a powerful Islamist ideology (contra rationalism). Its members are willing to die for these ideas. The main line of debate is not about whether or not its ideas matter for explaining its behavior.  The debate is over whether al-Qaeda action is fully expressive and completely non-strategic (killing for the sake of killing, irrational hatred of the West unrelated to specific policies, self-actualization to get to heaven), or else strategically rational within the bounds of its worldview (specific actions aimed at producing specific results, to influence the target or a watching audience). 

This is a debate fully defined in constructivist terms.  The 'strong' case (fully expressive action) eliminates material considerations and rational strategy completely;  the 'weak' case falls exactly within the Wendt-Fearon synthesis (rational action within a 'game' defined by the identities, discourses, and beliefs of the actors).  Accepting the constructivist approach here, I hasten to repeat, does not mean accepting the 'expressive' account which denies strategic rationality to al-Qaeda:  it could also mean that understanding al-Qaeda's strategy requires understanding its worldview, what it sees as important, the casual links which it assumes between action and outcome. 

The American 'war of ideas' response fairly self-evidently takes ideas seriously.  For Realists, ideas shouldn't matter this much.  The 'war of ideas' also gets to the heart of the rationalism- constructivism debate.  Encouraging Muslim condemnations of terrorism follows what Thomas Risse called "the logic of appropriateness".  The public argument about terrorism is not about determining the distribution of benefits, or about material power... it's about moral argument and establishing what is appropriate behavior for those who identify as Muslims.   

A central strategy in the "war on terror" is the creation of a norm against terrorism.  Norm-creation was one of the key strands of constructivist research (Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink).  Realists (and hawks) argued bitterly against the relevance of such norms.  Trying to build a norm against terror concedes the point against which Realists and (some) rationalists fought for so long:  norms matter. Otherwise, why bother?  And if you want to know how to go about building an international norm, constructivists are the place to turn. 

Most popular understanding - and, I think, serious policy analysis - now rests on a constructivist account of political identity, of the relationship between identity and norms, and of the nature of political power.  Identities are fluid, not fixed;  interests do not follow obviously from material conditions; norms of appropriateness have a significant impact on political behavior;  and real power flows from the ability to define such norms.   

Hence, the war of ideas:  Al-Qaeda is trying to mobilize the Islamic umma against the West, explicitly aiming to manufacture a collective identity (Islamic) and to define the 'interests' which logically and necessarily follow from that identity.  If they succeed in establishing this norm, then violence against the West - a defensive jihad - becomes normatively appropriate.  Al-Qaeda's opponents are trying to establish a norm that terrorism is wrong:  morally unjustifiable and politically unacceptable.   What policy makers need to know is how to create such a norm, what strategies are likely to work and which will fail.

This is constructivism through and through... albeit a constructivism shot through with considerations of power, well stripped of jargon, and one whose policy relevance can no longer be denied.

Why did constructivism win?  Well, partly because it provided a more accurate and useful picture of the world, I think.  Because it took ideas and transnational forces and global norms seriously at a time when those leapt to the fore of foreign policy concerns.  But also partly because - and here I go out even further on a limb - at least some of the neo-cons in the Bush administration are really constructivists, whether they admit it or not.  Like constructivists, and unlike Realists, they believe that ideas matter, they believe in moral argument (at least for public consumption), they believe in the possibility of progressive change (spreading democracy).  That's why so many Realists opposed them. 

I think that most constructivists opposed the neo-con agenda in spite of this because the neo-con methods were so spectacularly at odds with those that they advocated:  working against rather than with global civil society, lecturing from a moral high ground rather than taking other seriously in dialogue, denigrating the UN and international law, invading Iraq without the UN or a global consensus behind them.   I think that this mismatch between goals and methods explains a lot of Bush's failures - why "shock and awe" failed to win over Arab public opinion, for example, or why it failed to win legitimacy for the Iraqi campaign and why that failure mattered so much.  But unlike the rationalist-constructivist or Realist-constructivist debates, the neocon-constructivist debate is really an intra-constructivist argument... if only the constructivists would recognize it as such and join in. 

(NOTE:  lightly edited version of something written for another purpose.   Trust me, I know that nobody really cares about this!)

(NOTE:  as some readers no doubt know, I am an IR constructivist, who has over the years taken some ribbing from policy-oriented friends for 'all that Habermas shit'.  This declaration of constructivist victory should therefore be taken as a provocation... one which hopefully will generate some fun dissent!)