Constructivist Security Studies: Multiple Targets, Key Components

Abstract

Within the field of security studies, discursive, post positivist, poststructuralist, and critical approaches today constitute alternative theoretical frameworks for analysis vis-à-vis the broadly defined rationalist approaches. Claiming that the international system is not fixed, but made and reproduced by human practices, all these constructivist approaches – marked by a similar meta-theoretical stand – have gained relevance within international studies since the early 1990s, when traditional analyses were challenged by the new security dynamics after the end of the Cold War. Going beyond the inclusion of ideas, norms and culture as important factors when analysing international security, these various theoretical schools challenge traditional security scholarships, questioning the way in which interests, threats and other basic concepts have been treated as exogenously given. Constructivist studies, in spite of a vivid internal diversity, share an interest in intersubjective systems of codes and symbols, hereunder discourse, images, and social practices as relevant to understanding security. This panel will discuss security issues within a constructivist framework, paying special attention to questions of ontology and epistemology. By doing so, this panel seeks to exemplify how analysis adhering to constructivist premises can help explain a variety of international security issues (i.e. the ‘breadth’ of analyses), and to launch a platform for discussing the key components of constructivism in applied security studies (i.e. the  ‘depth’ of analyses).

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