Constructivism as an international relations theory

Rules, law, and language lay at the core of the early theoretical Constructivist treatises, especially Nicholas Onuf’s World of Our Making and Friedrich Kratochwil’s Rules, Norms, and Decisions

¹ Each placed rule-and norm-governed reasoning as fundamental to political life, in the international no less than the domestic sphere

Foregrounding IR Constructivism’s own social and historical origins reveals that Constructivism in IR theory is the process of incorporating insights on the social construction of international reality from cognate disciplines, especially sociology but philosophy, social theory, cultural anthropology, geography, and social psychology

The New Constructivism in International Relations Theory was inspired in part inspired by the sense that constructivists, of all the types of IR scholars, should be the ones able to see how professions and social spaces work, and hence what they do to (and with) intellectual movements, like Constructivism