Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Mind, Self and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist

Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Edited by I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave. Pp. viii, 282. £3·50, paperback £1. 1970. (Cambridge University Press.)

Twenty years ago, in the pages of the, Journal of Common Market Studies, Hedley Bull launched a searing critique of the European Community's "civilian power" in international affairs. Since that time the increasing role of the European Union (EU) in areas of security and defence policy has led to a seductiveness in adopting the notion of "military power Europe". In contrast, I will attempt to argue that by thinking beyond traditional conceptions of the EU's international role and examining the case study of its international pursuit of the abolition of the death penalty, we may best conceive of the EU as a "normative power Europe".

Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms?

In order to avoid both theoretically eclectic and redundant approaches to constructivism, this article proposes one possible and coherent reconstruction of constructivism understood as a reflexive ...

A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations

Rather than exploring once again what the concept of power can mean for constructivists, this article analyses what constructivism implies for doing a conceptual analysis; here, of power. It will try to show that besides an analytical assessment (`what does power mean'), a constructivist conceptual analysis includes a study of the performative aspects of concepts (`what does `power' do'?), which, in turn is embedded into a conceptual history or genealogy (how has `power' become to mean and able to do what it does?'). The analysis will show that a neutral or descriptive meaning of power cannot be found, since the meaning of power is always embedded in a theoretical context; hence conceptual and theoretical analysis interact with each other. It will further argue that attributing `power' has the effect of `politicising' issues, moving actions into the scrutiny of a public realm where justifications are needed. Finally, it sketches one hypothetical lineage for understanding the origins of these particular pe...

The concept of power: a constructivist analysis

Realism explains the ruling of the international system through the underlying distribution of power among states. Increasingly, analysts have found this power analysis inadequate, and they have developed new concepts, most prominently structural power. The usage of structural power actually entails three different meanings, namely indirect institutional power, nonintentional power, and impersonal power. Only the first, however, is compatible with the current neorealist choice-theoretical mode of explanation. This is the basic paradox of recent power approaches: by wanting to retain the central role of power, some international relations and international political economy theory is compelled to expand that concept and to move away from the very theory that claims to be based on power. Neorealism does not take power seriously enough. At the same time, these extensions of the concept are themselves partly fallacious. To account simultaneously for the different meanings of structural power and to avoid a conceptual overload, this article proposes that any power analysis should necessarily include a pair or dyad of concepts of power, linking agent power and impersonal governance. Finally, it sketches some consequences of those concepts for international theory.

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Structural Power: The limits of neorealist power analysis

Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy : the continuing story of a death foretold

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Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold

The article seeks to offer a way forward in discussions about the status of securitization theory. In my reading, this debate has been inhibited by the difficulty of finding an appropriate version of ‘understanding/explanation’ that would be consistent with the meta-theoretical commitments of a post-structuralist theory. By leaving ‘explanation’ and/or all versions of causality to the positivist other, the Copenhagen School also left its own explanatory status often implicit, or only negatively defined. Instead, the present article claims that the explanatory theory used in securitization research de facto relies on causal mechanisms that are non-positivistically conceived. Using the appropriate methodological literature renders this explanatory status explicit, exposing the theory’s non-positivist causality and thus, hopefully, enhancing its empirical theory.

Stefano Guzzini

Papers

A Reconstruction of Constructivism in International Relations

The concept of power: a constructivist analysis

Structural Power: The limits of neorealist power analysis

Realism in International Relations and International Political Economy: The Continuing Story of a Death Foretold

Securitization as a causal mechanism