The Evolution of International Security Studies by Barry Buzan & Lene Hansen

Author:Barry Buzan & Lene Hansen [Buzan, Barry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2009-08-26T16:00:00+00:00

Constructivisms: norms, identities and narratives

The introduction of Constructivism as a self-identified perspective into ISS was largely a consequence of the general IR debate in the early 1990s between so-called rationalist and reflectivist approaches (Keohane, 1988). As this distinction reflected American social science traditions more than European ones (where rationalist epistemologies had never had the same privileged position), there was a distinct US–Europe flavour to the map of the 1990s security debates: European approaches (Critical Security Studies and the Copenhagen School in particular) were more strongly linked with the political, critical and normative concerns of Peace Research, while most of US Constructivism developed from the rationalism–reflectivism debate with no similar connection to past normative approaches. Poststructuralism started out most strongly as a North American perspective but gradually gained more ground in Europe, while Feminism provided a counterpoint to traditional approaches in both Europe and the United States. As the 1990s went on, Constructivism branched off into a Conventional and a Critical branch, where the latter had some interesting affinities to earlier Peace Research themes and concepts (Adler, 1997b; Katzenstein et al., 1998; Wendt, 1999). These developments are illustrated in Figure 7.2.

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