Amitav Acharya
I did not start out as a constructivist and still hesitate to call myself one, although I do not mind (and secretly enjoy) when others call me a constructivist. The reasons for my ambivalence about constructivism go back to its initial years, when I found myself asking: What, if any, relevance does the the supposedly new, optimistic, and progressive theory (in terms of its stress on moral transformation and community building in world politics) have for the study of international relations of the non-Western world? While IR theories generally tend to be Western-centric, would constructivism be any different by offering more space to the study of non-Western states and societies? The reasons for IR’s Western-centrism—including the dominance and gatekeeping role of Western IR scholars, institutions, and publication outlets, and the resource and intellectual constraints in which scholars from the Global South find themselves and how to remedy them intellectually and institutionally—have already been identified and discussed (Acharya 2000; Acharya and Buzan 2007; Acharya 2014b). Frankly, I was not hopeful that constructivism would make a big difference in this state of affairs, at least based on my first reading of Wendt’s Social Theory of International Politics and an exchange with him at a roundtable on his book at the annual convention of the International Studies Association in Chicago in 2001. There went some of my early enthusiasm for a theory that was rapidly gaining ground as the principal challenge to the hitherto dominance of realism and liberalism.
While constructivism seemed different, I did not (and still do not, despite major strides it has made in recent years) see it as a sufficiently universal framework of inquiry and analysis of international relations. Its founding literature, beginning with Wendt, fell short of my understanding of what a truly global IR should be, that is, a discipline that “draw(s) from a broad canvass of human interactions, with their multiple origins, patterns, and distinctions, to challenge IR’s existing boundary markers set by dominant American and Western scholarship and encourage new understandings and approaches to the study of world politics” (Acharya 2014b). Onuf’s chapter in this volume dealing with the origins of constructivism confirms my view that the key founders of the theory (Onuf being among them) did not see it necessary or important to engage with the ideas, worldviews, and agency claims of non-Western societies. Yet, constructivism is not without such potential, and while it cannot be identical to it, it can be, along with such critical theories as postcolonialism and feminism, a vanguard theory of Global IR.
Constructivism poses a particular challenge to anyone who saw it as a savior against the dominance of realism and liberalism as the mainstream theories of international relations. Despite its claim to novelty and its affinity with critical theories of international relations, constructivism has become fairly mainstream theory. It has made such rapid strides over the past two decades in shaping the research agendas of young scholars and winning converts from among older ones that it has become, in the eyes of its critics, the new orthodoxy. In the 2014 Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) Survey (2014), constructivism came out the top choice of an IR paradigm with 22.5 percent, followed by realism and liberalism. (It should be noted, however, that the numbers of those who opted for “I do not use a paradigm” exceeded constructivism, attesting to the aforementioned point about the declining interest in paradigm debates).1 Wendt has displaced Keohane as “the scholar whose work has had the greatest influence on the field of IR in the past 20 years.”2
Despite its growing popularity, my initial misgivings about constructivism’s affinity with the two other mainstream theories—realism and liberalism—in neglecting non-Western voices and experiences are borne out by two of the contributions to this volume. They suggest that constructivism might be no better than realism and liberalism when it comes to IR theory’s gross neglect or marginalization of the non-Western world. Different methods are pursued in chapters 2 and 6, but on this matter they end up in the same place.
Consider first one of the findings of chapter 2, the contribution by Bertucci, Hayes, and James. Analyzing an extensive journal-based dataset, they find that “despite constructivism’s place as the leading theoretical alternative to rationalist approaches to the study of international relations, in terms of its substantive and empirical scope constructivism does not look much different than rationalist alternatives like realism and liberalism. In all cases, scholarship primarily focuses on security processes and outcomes taking place in the North Atlantic region and Europe.” They note that about 45 percent of their sampled constructivist research relates to the North Atlantic region, followed by 13.1 percent on Asia, whereas “regions such as Latin America, Africa and, most notably, the Middle East, have received only scant attention.” In the conclusion of the chapter, they further note that “constructivism is an approach to the study of international relations that . . . makes security issues in the North Atlantic region its salient substantive and empirical focus of analysis.” Aside from the substance or issue areas of constructivist research, they also find that scholars from Europe, North America, and Oceania (Australia and New Zealand) account for 93.5 percent of all articles by constructivist scholars. Among other regions, Asia leads at a mere 4.1 percent.
The other contribution that shows constructivism’s false promise in engaging the Global South is by Klotz (chapter 6), who examines and laments constructivism’s “race gap,” or its neglect of race. To be sure, race and racism are not exclusively “non-Western” issues. But Klotz is not entirely correct in my view in saying that “no one to my knowledge has undertaken a thorough critique regarding the race gap in IR theory.” While much depends on what one means by “thorough” here, race is the salient issue for a large section of the IR academic community in the Global South, and its neglect in traditional IR has attracted much criticism from them (Persaud and Walker 2001; Henderson 2013; Hobson 2012; Bell 2013; Persaud 2014). What justifies Klotz’s lament about constructivism’s “race gap,” however, is that none of these contributions is from a constructivist.
Constructivism itself may not have the racial baggage of its older cousins, realism and liberalism (Hobson 2012), but it still suffers from a heavy dose of Western ethnocentrism. I have outlined some of these areas before, especially the “moral cosmopolitanism” bias in the early literature on norm diffusion (Acharya 2004, 2009). Whether consciously or not, at least to a non-Western observer, these narratives were mostly built around how good global norms promoted by transnational norm entrepreneurs (who happen to be mostly Western), drove out bad local beliefs and practices (which happened to occur mostly in the non-Western world). Although not all norm literature was like this, most of it took little note of the legitimate normative priors of non-Western societies and the agency of non-Western actors in norm creation and propagation. A good deal of my own work on norms was inspired by acute frustration with constructivism’s neglect of southern agency, which has led to the concepts of constitutive localization (Acharya 2004, 2009), norm subsidiarity (Acharya 2011b), and norm circulation (Acharya 2013b).
But such criticisms of constructivism should not blind us to the efforts made by constructivist scholars to engage with issues and concerns of the Global South. To some scholars, constructivism holds significant promise as a theory relevant and applicable to the non-Western world. This is particularly true in light of constructivism’s greater capacity to account for local practice, identity, custom, and how these shape international behavior (see, for instance, Solomon and Steele (2016).) As a German scholar notes:
Constructivism has always had a strong academic base outside of the US; European IR has even been characterized by its preference for constructivist ontologies. . . . Furthermore, constructivism is a paradigm often characterized as frequently “traveling” to non-core regions . . . and even as “bridge-builder” between core and periphery IR. . . . It can therefore be expected that constructivist approaches to IR can be found even outside of the transatlantic core. All in all, it is a most likely case of a branch of IR that is not US-dominated. (Wemheuer-Vogelaar 2013, 2)
Yet much of this potential remains unrealized to date. But it need not be. Among the three “mainstream” IR theories today, realism has some broad resonance with non-Western history and culture, as its occasional if superficial engagement with Chinese (legalism) and Indian (Kautilya) traditions attests. Liberalism is perhaps the most ethnocentric of IR theories (Hobson 2012). It derives its foundational narratives, core ideas, and policy practices almost exclusively from the West. Thus free trade is the result of British and American policy preferences and dominance, multilateralism is a unique product of American hegemony, and the current world order is the exclusive product of American power and purpose. Liberalism also insists on co-opting non-Western actors into its ambit without making a serious effort at recognizing the unquestionably multiple and global heritage of its core ideas such as free trade, human rights, rights of protest against authority, and ruled-based interstate cooperation. By comparison, there is nothing innate or inevitable about constructivism’s disconnect with or neglect of the Global South. It is largely the result of how the theory originated and evolved and of the larger issue of the narrow training that IR scholars offer and receive in the dominant Western centers of knowledge production, which are under increasing scrutiny and challenge.
How does constructivism differ from realism and liberalism? At least in three ways. The first has to do with its emphasis on ideational forces in world politics. Here, I do not see constructivism as “ideas all the way down,” but as an “ideas first” approach. Since a hallmark of non-Western (Third World) countries has been their relative lack of material power (which may be changing in the case of the emerging powers), a theory that stresses the power of ideas over ideas of power has a broader, more universal resonance in the study of world politics. Writing around the time constructivism began to obtain a substantial following, Puchala noted that for “Third World countries, ideas and ideologies are far more important” than power or wealth. This is because whereas “powerlessness” and “unequal distribution of the world’s wealth” are “constants,” ideas can be empowering (Puchala 1998, 151). In other words, by broadening the notion of agency to include both material and ideational elements, constructivism, to a much greater extent than materialist theories like realism and liberalism, gives more space to the consideration of the agency of weaker actors in the international system, which includes much of the Global South. Since a good deal of IR theory rests on considerations of agency, constructivism offers an important avenue for recognizing the role of non-Western actors in world politics.
Second, and this is really fortunate for the admirers of the theory, some of the best constructivist work since the founding literature by Onuf, Wendt, and Ruggie, etc., has been concerned with the study of regional dynamics in the Global South. While taking note of the important observation by Bertucci, Hayes, and James about constructivist scholarship’s preoccupation with the North Atlantic region, I can point to scholarship that has already done much to render constructivism more global. Some of the best proponents of constructivism are also some of the best regional specialists and many focus outside Europe. Here I have in mind scholars such as Barnett (1995, 1998) on the Middle East, Kacowitz (2005) and Sikkink (2014) on Latin America, Johnston (1998) and Hemmer and Katzenstein (2002) on East Asia, and many others. The hallmark of the highly influential book Security Communities (Adler and Barnett 1998), was its focus on regions, both Europe and outside. This literature has been invaluable in stimulating my own work on the intersection of IR theory and Asian and comparative regionalism (Acharya 2001, 2004, 2009, 2011b).
A third reason why constructivism is better suited than either realism or liberalism for the study of non-Western societies has to do with its deep association with culture and identity. Cultural distinctiveness, or claims about it, are often the starting point of the study of international relations in many parts of the developing world. In the words of Iriye, international relations is primarily about the study of intercultural relations (Iriye 1979). And a Malaysian IR scholar (Karim 2007) writes, “Thinking in the constructivist vein has been about the best gift made available to scholars and leaders in the region.”
Different people have different ideas as to what IR theory should do to shed its Western-centrism (Acharya 2000, 2014b; Agathangelou and Ling 2009; Tickner 2003; Tickner and Waever 2009; Behera 2010; Bilgin 2008, 2013; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Ling 2002; Neuman 1998; Parasar 2013; Shilliam 2010; Smith 2006; Thomas and Wilkin 2004; Tadjbakhsh 2010). But common to all these attempts is to reject the claim of IR as a truly global discipline unless and until it accounts for the ideas, experiences, and voices of all civilizations, societies, and states. This leads me to return to the topic of a global IR (Acharya 2013a, 2014b).
By global IR, I mean the collective efforts by the IR community, both from the West and the Global South, to expand the horizons of IR theory beyond the histories, ideas, identities, and practices of Europe and the United States. The origins of the global IR idea reflected growing and widespread dissatisfaction with American and Western dominance in IR theory. Global IR supersedes Acharya and Buzan’s (2007, 2010) “Non-Western IRT” or the idea of a “post-Western” IR (Bilgin 2008, 2013). Indeed, it transcends the distinction between West and non-West. While these categories might persist as terms of convenience, they lose analytical significance in the world of global IR.
Global IR is not an attempt to build a new or distinctive theory. Nor is it a paradigm to be juxtaposed against realism, liberalism, constructivism, or postcolonialism. Its purpose is not to launch another grand debate, like the “interparadigm” debates between idealism and realism, behavioralism and postpositivism, or rationalism and constructivism, which often end up in synthesis. Global IR begins with a syncretism, or eclecticism, with its chief goal being to develop a truly inclusive and universal discipline. Global IR subsumes, rather than supplants, existing IR theories and methods. It embraces both mainstream (realism, liberalism, and constructivism) and critical approaches (especially postcolonialism and feminism) but is agnostic about the theoretical and methodological instincts and preferences of the scholars. For example, global IR has much common ground with postcolonialism. But unlike some postcolonial scholarship, global IR does not reject mainstream theories, but challenges their parochialism and urges that they be infused and broadened with ideas, experiences, and insights from the non-Western world.
Global IR is a framework of enquiry and analysis of international relations in all its diversity, especially with due recognition of the experiences, voices, and agency of those actors—both state and nonstate—that have been marginalized by the discipline of international relations. These include, but are not limited to, those that are outside of, and challenging to, the interstate system of Europe and its colonial expansion, which has been central to the construction of dominant IR theories, including constructivism. Hence global IR is grounded in world history (or global history), rather than just Greco-Roman, European, or US history. While eschewing cultural exceptionalism, global IR seeks to uncover endogenously driven patterns of interaction around the world, paying attention to local, regional, and interregional dynamics and through them the agency of non-Western actors. Global IR prizes and integrates the study of regions, regionalisms, and area studies. As mentioned above, some of the best constructivist work deeply is focused on regional dynamics and engages area studies. One cannot develop a global discipline of IR out of North America or western Europe alone; global IR is an impossibility without having its foundation in local IRs around the world. Some of this is already happening, at least conceptually, in some regions of the world outside of Europe, especially in Latin America (Deciancio 2016; Frasson-Quenoz 2016) and Southeast Asia, with the development of ASEAN studies in Southeast Asia (Rother 2012).
Finally, Global IR recognizes and investigates the multiple and complex ways civilizations and states interact with each other, including through peaceful processes of mutual learning.
There is much that constructivism—with its focus on ideas, identity, and interactions—can do to inform and contribute to the development of global IR. But to do so, constructivism needs to reimagine and reorient itself and perform several tasks. This volume contains a number of essays that challenge constructivism to rethink, reform, and redefine itself. This effort can immensely benefit from a global IR approach that fully engages the ideas, histories, and approaches found in the non-Western world. Let me offer some pathways to this broadening and redefining of constructivism to play the role of vanguard to a global IR.
The first concerns the issue of agency. Kessler and Steele (chapter 4) call for a rethinking of agency in constructivist theory and in this context stress the importance of language. That the concept of agency on Western IR theory, including earlier version of constructivism, has been too narrow is not difficult to prove, especially when looking at the construction of global order and governance. Goddard and Krebs’ (chapter 5) plea for more attention to legitimation, itself a form of agency, can also benefit from more attention to the different concepts and approaches found in the non-Western world, where normative legitimation and delegitimation have been far more empowering and consequential than dissent or resistance through material (economic and military) means. (See the discussion of the delegitimation of US Cold War alliances in Acharya 2009.)
Thus, constructivism should promote a broader definition of agency, backed by an elaborate research agenda. Global IR recognizes multiple forms of agency beyond material power, including resistance, normative action, and local constructions of global order. Global IR is founded upon a pluralistic universalism. Moreover, global IR questions the early constructivist literature’s “power bias,” or its emphasis on the role of powerful actors in norm diffusion in world politics. Indeed, the realist-liberal-constructivist divide breaks down when it comes to privileging the role of materially powerful actors in shaping world order. This is true of the hegemonic stability theory, which synthesizes the realist notion of structural power with the liberal notion of public good, as well as constructivism, which subjects the dynamics of socialization and norm diffusion (Florini 1996) to the logic of power.
A broader understanding of agency would see it not just as the prerogative of the strong, but also as the weapon of the weak. Agency can be exercised in global transnational space as well as at regional and local levels. Agency can describe acts of resistance to and localization of global norms and institutions. Agency also means constructing new rules and institutions at the local level to support and strengthen global order against great power hypocrisy and dominance. Agency means conceptualizing and implementing new pathways to development, security, and ecological justice. Recent work on global governance highlights many examples of agency by non-Western actors, such as the extension of universal sovereignty at the 1955 Bandung Conference (Acharya 2014a), the invention of the idea of international development by Sun yat-Sen (Helleneier 2014), the idea of universal participation (Finnemore and Jurkovitch 2014), and contributions to the development of the human rights idea by postcolonial states (Sikkink 2014). Add to this literature that traces the emergence of the ideas of human development and human security and even responsibility to protect from non-Western contexts and thinkers (Acharya 2013a, 2013b). The fact that many if not all of these contributors are constructivists suggests that the theory can be at the forefront of the pluralization of agency in IR theory, which is vital to making it less Western-centric and building a global IR. Other theories could follow the example set by these constructivists, since the purpose of global IR is not to displace them or constructivism itself, but challenge them to look beyond the West in rethinking their assumptions, developing new concepts, understandings, methodological tools, and appreciating the work of those non-Western scholars who have already done so.
Aside from agency, constructivism needs to make a conscious effort to bring in the ideas of the non-Western world as a source of concepts and theories of IR. While realism has done so to a limited degree from classical China and India to illustrate the workings of competition, war, balancing, hegemony, and power politics (i.e., to illustrate how their approach is unbounded by time or space), constructivism can similarly help with the sources of existing and new international norms. Here constructivism, with its emphasis on culture and identity, can be of much help. As an ideational theory, one would have expected constructivism to pay more attention to the study of non-Western civilizations. Yet such work remains scarce and needs to be further encouraged, with constructivism playing a vanguard role. The kind of constructivist contributions on constitutive norms and culture of IR drawing on Greco-Roman civilizations (Reus-Smit 2001; Lebow 2008) is conspicuously scarce when it comes to classical interactions in the Indian Ocean region and elsewhere.
But such work holds much promise. For example, in presenting his “relational theory of world politics,” Qin (2016) argues that international relations scholars should look beyond rationality and embrace relationality, in explaining foreign policy and international behavior and outcomes in a more universal context. Relationality not only deeply resonates within Chinese culture, it can also be applied to other contexts, even the West. In his view, it is not that the Western actors do not behave relationally; it may well be that Western IR theories, because of their obsession with rationality, have overlooked or rendered invisible the relationality aspect. Qin does not regard rationality and relationality as mutually antithetical, but complementary to each other. At the same time, it should not be overlooked that Qin is also a constructivist, and there are obvious echoes of constructivism in Qin’s idea of relationality. To that extent, Western and non-Western approaches to IR can converge or find common ground and be mutually reinforcing. Global IR after all does not seek to displace but to subsume existing IR theories and enrich them with the infusion of ideas and practices from the non-Western world. Qin’s relational theory is also significant because unlike some other members of the “Chinese School of IR,” it offers a concept and explanation that have relevance beyond China or East Asia, rather than simply capture China’s international behavior or the East Asian international system.
A related task here involves a full-scale embracing of world history (or global history), featuring especially the study of pre-Westphalian interstate (or “international”) systems. Both anarchic and hierarchic systems should be included and studied, and their definition should be based as much on ideational sociocultural interactions (here one can specify flow of ideas as a crucial type of interaction) as on political/strategic and economic ones (which is central to most traditional definitions of international systems). These broadenings open the space to considering a variety of classical interactions and relationships, such as the maritime orders of Asia and the Indian Ocean. Again, given that a good deal of such interactions is ideational and intercivilizational, constructivism can play a major role in the investigation into non- and pre-Westphalian systems. Furthermore, neither “global history” nor any of its variants are taught very often within doctoral programs in the United States.
A further task for constructivism concerns the philosophy of science. The project of turning IR scientific, even by those who take a broader view of science, has led to the insistence that only phenomena that is “this worldly” is worthy of investigation. Yet as noted above, a good deal of the potential and actual sources on non-Western or global IR come from philosophy of religion, where the distinction between “this worldliness” and “otherworldliness” is often thin. Many religious philosophies straddle both. The lines between rationality and instrumental thinking are frequently blurred in a good deal of classical thought and practice in non-European civilizations, with the Indian epic Mahabharata being a leading example (Acharya 2011a). If one is to broaden the scope of IRT, one cannot exclude such hybrid causal logics, which do explain war, peace, interdependence, foreign policy behavior, the creation and distribution of wealth, and the spread of ideas and norms. This approach resonates with the call, following others such as Fearon and Wendt and Checkel, by Glaser (chapter 11) to find common ground between rationalism and constructivism. IR theorists are asked to view them more as friends than rivals.
Fourth, constructivism must overcome the related problem of false universalism (Acharya 2013a) in mainstream IR theories. (The universalism comes from an effort to emulate physics/economics in the pursuit of covering laws. These are false only after one steps out of the neopositivist mindset.) For global IR, true universalism is one that recognizes the diversity of human interactions, rather than one that legitimizes the imposition of a temporally and temporarily dominant Western civilization. Liberalism is especially beholden to what Cox (2002, 53) would say is Enlightenment of universalism. In this sense, universalism meant “true for all time and space—the perspective of a homogenous reality.” For Cox, an alternative understanding of universality would mean “comprehending and respecting diversity in an ever changing world.” Constructivism, with its focus on identity, can point to an alternative direction, where universalism was less about “applying to all” and more about recognizing diversity and finding common elements and common ground among agents and structures.
The fifth task, which closely follows from the above, concerns the language and vocabulary of international relations, which are closely tied to the issue of identity that occupies a central place in constructivist theory. IR theory often purports to speak in a universal linguistic code, but many of the core concepts or vocabulary of IR theory—such as power, sovereignty, balancing, peace, empire, norms—derive directly or indirectly (e.g., via old French) from Greek and Latin. This partly explains the persisting Western-centrism in the field, given that the common tendency to view key political terms in terms of their etymological origins often leads us back to interactions during the Greek and Roman worlds, ignoring that they might have been the unique product of a specific time and context that the West has claimed as its cultural and intellectual heritage. Hence a key challenge where constructivism can be of particular value is the recognition of the cultural and historical context of existing concepts so that they do not become part of an artificial universal code that ignores or obscures other origins. This may be the most daunting challenge of all tasks that constructivism and global IR face today.
Because of the hegemony of Greek and Latin origins of the core concepts of IR, scholars think of these terms in a specific way. If you want to understand hegemony, you start with Greek hēgemonía, and you think of the Hellenistic world, which by the way was a world where legitimizing ideas spread with the backing of competition and force. When you think of empire, you think of imperium and imperator, and your mind travels to Rome as the archetype empire, with all its violent direct political control. Yet if you think of the spread of ideas in the Indian Ocean, the situation is different, where Indian ideas spread without the backing of force and where the Chinese imperium ruled more by symbolic authority that brute physical force.
To compound matters, other languages may not have the equivalent meaning to these core concepts. The Chinese are often puzzled by the steady stream of words that the West comes up with to deal with them that have no equivalent in their own language, such as “engagement,” “confidence-building,” “human security.” They do not even have an exact equivalent of “sovereignty” (“zhu quan” or master/patron rights). For them, “engagement,” a favorite policy term of the United States, is “jie chu,” meaning “touch and connect.” The term “security” is translated as “an quan” in Chinese, but this exact Chinese term can also be used for “safety,” which has less of a military connotation.
The Chinese have no sense of “international-ness” as it is understood in the West (Qin 2010); hence, how do they relate to the discipline of international relations? In response, the Chinese have come up with their own terms like “Tianxia” (space under heaven), “datong” (universal great harmony), and other such terms to describe their worldview. There are also more politically charged concepts like “peaceful rise,” “peaceful development,” “convergence of interests,” and “community of interests.” While their deployment is sometimes (but not always) self-serving, it is not entirely different from the purposes to which the West’s “democratic peace” or “liberal hegemony” are employed. In the orthodox Islamic world, IR becomes meaningless because the idea of sovereign state is regarded as but a temporary aberration rather than a permanent condition (Tadjbakhsh 2010). Just think of the day when ten key and widely used concepts in IR theory are taken from Mandarin or Sanskrit or Arabic. Consider this possibility in comparison to the contents of table E.1. What a different world of IR it might be?
The above tasks and challenges are not just for constructivism to address. IR theory in general must confront them if it is to assert a credible claim to be universal and retain relevance in a post-Western world. But constructivism, with its stress on ideas, identity, and interactions, can play a vanguard role if it can rise above its narrow Western origins and concerns. Its willingness and ability to do so is critical not only to its own future, but to IR theory and the discipline as a whole.
1. Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Survey (2014). Available at https://trip.wm.edu/charts/#/questions/38.
2. Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) Survey (2014). Available at https://trip.wm.edu/charts/#/bargraph/38/5045.
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