Constructivism,

ontological and
epistemological
UAB, April 2025
Oriol Costa
History and constructivism’s
raise
• Theoretically
• Narrow theoretical debate. Neo-neo. Rationalism synthesis
• Linguistic turn in other social sciences
• Late 1980s
• Quite some changes in international relations. Reagan and the end of containment.
Gorbachov and the end of the limited sovereignty.
• Then: end of the Cold War
• The end of the CW leads to an explosion of interest in constructivism:
• Nobody expected 1989
• Plus, norm effervescence. Expansion and deepening of the Western liberal order
• Much later (2010s onwards), focus on contestation, erosion of the LIO
Where to locate constructivism
• Now, a respectable alternative to rationalism
• a ‘middle way’ (Adler 1997) between mainstream IR and the more radical
critique
• But more radical in its inception (mid to late 1980s):
• Friedrich Kratochwil (1989)
• Nicholas Onuf (1989)
• Alexander Wendt (1987)
• De-naturalize what is perceived as fixed and constant in IR
From material to social
• What does the dichotomy mean in this context?
• Material: facts that are independent of human action and perception. Rotation
of the Earth
• Social: facts that depend for their existence of socially established conventions.
Money.
• Social reality is not pre-given: human agents construct and reproduce it
through everyday practices
• Caveat: plenty of realists would draw the line between material and
social in a different place (e.g. a tank)
• Caveat 2: material is used with a different meaning by historical
materialists (who also share a social ontology)
From atomistic to social
• We have talked about the atomistic vs social dichotomy before. But:
• Just like rational choice theory is a methodological choice that is associated
with individual human agency and hence an atomistic ontology…
• The social ontology of constructivism is also associated with a particular
epistemology (on most of the occasions)
• If human agents do not exist independently from their social environment
and its collectively shared systems of meanings, then…
• methods should take into account mutual constitution of human agents and their
social environment (including the shared meanings associated with such environment)
• Middle-ground between individualism and structuralism: there are properties
of both agents and structures that cannot be explained without each other
The influence of
structurationists
• Influence of structurationists in sociology (e.g. Anthony
Giddens)
• Structures do not mechanically determine what actors do
• relationship between structures and actors involves intersubjective
understanding and meaning
• Structures constrain actors, but actors can transform
structures, by acting on them in new ways
• Relational
Ok, what are constructivists’
key tenets
• Starting point: states (and all the rest of international actors) are
social actors
• Implications: the construction of preferences
• Socialization, perceptions of what is normal
• Norms. Stability and change (norm promoters and contestation).
• Two logics: consequentialist vs appropriateness. Although this is grossly
misplaced
Finnemore and Sikkink 1998
Constructivists and constitutive
norms
Beyond regulative norms: the constitutive role of norms.
• Sovereignty
• Great powers
• Identities. Stability. Who you are, who you are for the other, who are the
others.
• Practices: understandable only under a given discursive structure, which is
enacted by practices (Hopf)
Hopf 1998
• “Actors develop their relations with, and understandings of, others
through the media of norms and practices. In the absence of norms,
exercises of power, or actions, would be devoid of meaning. Constitutive
norms define an identity by specifying the actions that will cause others
to recognize that identity and respond to it appropriately.”
• “Since structure is meaningless without some inter-subjective set of
norms and practices, anarchy, mainstream international relations theory’s
most crucial structural component, is meaningless. Neither anarchy, that
is, the absence of any authority above the state, nor the distribution of
capabilities, can “socialize” states to the desiderata of the international
system’s structure absent some set of meaningful norms and practices.”
• Not even when the house is on fire will fire be enough to determine
individual behaviour. Norms on what to do mediate between fire and
behaviour.
• Fire alarms are not warning system. They give permission to leave.
Two types of constructivism
• As always, too many labels. We look here at Knud Erik Jørgensen’s:
ontological and epistemological constructivisms.
• Ontology and epistemology tend to go together. A social/constitutive
ontology will lend itself to an interpretative epistemology.
• But there are ways to conjure up a research agenda on norms that is of
an explanatory kind.
• Hence, two constructivisms:
• Ontological constructivism: different from rationalism only as regards ontology.
Also called conventional constructivism.
• Epistemological constructivism: different from rationalism both as regards
ontology and epistemology. Also called critical constructivism.
Two types of constructivism
• The key is: explaining or understanding
• Conventional constructivists wish to discover identities and their
associated reproductive social practices, and then offer an account of
how those identities imply certain actions.
• Critical theorists have a different aim. They also wish to surface
identities, but not to articulate their effects, but to elaborate on how
people come to believe in a single version of a naturalized truth.
(next slide)
Two types of constructivism
• Critical/epistemological constructivism: closer to critical theory
• Conventional/ontological constructivism: closer to the mainstream
But both share ontology. And this has implications:
• Both aim to ”denaturalize” the social world, that is, to empirically
discover and reveal how the institutions and practices and identities
that people take as natural, given, or matter of fact, are, in fact, the
product of human agency, of social construction.
• Both believe that intersubjective reality and meanings are critical data
for understanding the social world.
Constructivists beyond norms
Constructivists on matters that are central for mainstream IR
• Anarchy* (Wendt)
• Power* (Barnett and Duvall)
• International institutions* (Finnemore)
• National security (Katzenstein)
Anarchy. Wendt 1992.
• It’s process, not structure.
• Actors have influence over their environment and vice versa. Anarchy is
what states make of it.
• Anarchy does not need to lead to self-help.
• Three “cultures of anarchy”:
• Hobbesian
• Lockean
• Kantian
• Preferences and identities are social and intersubjective. Change is possible,
but not immediate. He proposes a thought experiment: a first interaction
situation.
Three cultures of anarchy
Hobbesian
• war of all against all
• states are adversaries and war is endemic
Lockean
• restraint
• States are rivals and they recognise each others right to exist
Kantian
• states are friends and disputes settled peacefully
• mutual support if third party threats a state
• among liberal democracies since WWII
Hopf on Wendt
• If diverse understandings of anarchy are possible, then you can think
of a continuum of anarchies: different policy domains or regions
under the spell of different combinations of such understandings.
Power
• Barnett and Duvall (2005)
• The association of power with realism has to do with realism’s rivals
wish to distance themselves from considerations over power
• Neoinstitutionalists: sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit understanding
that institutions can be antidotes against power.
• Mainstream constructivist: emphasis on the causal relevance of norms and
norm structures and the processes of learning and persuasion [this has
changed since the publication of the book: contestation].
Power
• Definiton of power: “power is the production, in and through social relations, of
effects that shape the capacities of actors to determine their circumstances and
fate”.
• Two analytical dimensions:
• The type of social relations through which power acts
• Social relations of interaction: power as an attribute of specific actors and their interactions
• Social relations of constitution: power as a social process by which social identities and actor capacities are
constituted
• It can operate, for example, by issuing commands, or in underlying social structures and systems of
knowledge that advantage some and disadvantage others.
• The specificity of social realtions through which power acts.
• Direct and specific social relations
• Indirect and diffuse social relations
• It can operate, for example, at the very instant when the gun is brandished, or through diffuse processes
embedded in international institutions that establish rules determining who gets to participate in debates
and make decisions.
Power
Power
• Compulsory power: direct control of one actor over another.
• Institutional power: indirect control of one actor over others through
difuse and distant interaction
• Structural power: constitution of the capacities of subjects, in
structural relationship among each other
• Productive power: socially diffused production of subjectivity. For
instance:: Western, civilized, failed, unstable, European, refugee,
displaced, civilian, combatant

• Not alternative concepts, but different facets of power

Power
• Compulsory Power: Direct Control Over Another
• Institutional Power: Actors' Control Over Socially Distant Others
• Structural Power: Direct and Mutual Constitution of the Capacities of Actors
• Explicitly following Lukes and Gramsci, Gill and Law argue that while power exists in coercion and institutional arrangements, to
understand the workings of the global capitalist economy requires recognition of global production relations as constitutive
structure. For them, as well as other Gramscians and historical materialists, the structure of global capitalism substantially
determines the capacities and resources of actors. It also shapes their ideology-that is, the interpretive system through which
they understand their interests and desires.
• Productive Power: Production of Subjects Through Diffuse Social Relations
• Structural power is structural constitution, that is, the production and reproduction of internally related positions of super- and
subordination, or domination, that actors occupy. Productive power, by contrast, is the constitution of all social subjects with
various social powers through systems of knowledge and discursive practices of broad and general social scope. Conceptually,
the move is away from structures, per se, to systems of signification and meaning (which are structured, but not themselves
structures), and to networks of social forces perpetually shaping one another.
• In Foucault's archetypical formulation, humans are not only power's intended targets, but also its effects. Discourse, therefore,
is socially productive for all subjects, constituting the subjectivity of all social beings of diverse kinds with their contingent,
though not entirely fluid, identities, practices, rights, responsibilities, and social capacities. Productive power concerns the
boundaries of all social identity, and the capacity and inclination for action for the socially advantaged and disadvantaged alike,
as well as the myriad social subjects that are not constituted in binary hierarchical relationships.
Finnemore and the role of
International institutions
Finnemore and the role of
International institutions