Social Theories

Social Theories

1. Constructivism

   • They are based on social interaction to explain the identities and ideas of individuals and states
     • It is best described as an approach rather than a theory
       • Most constructivist explanations are based on the principle of identity to explain international behavior
         • Constructivists, politics, power, anarchy and military force can not explain changes in states, while institutions, regimes, norms and changes in identity are better explanations.
   • Identities and ideas matter
     • Constructivism is interested in how actors define their national interests, threats to liberals against feminism and their relationships to each other
       • States decide what they want based not only on material needs, but also on social interaction
         • Constructivists emphasize that identities and norms must be used to explain the behaviors of states
           • New ideas and norms, instead of power and self-interest, drive the behavior of the state

2. Social theories see preferences as shaped by the actors social interactions and relationships

   • Social theories, based primarily on the identity principle, lack the simplicity of realist and liberal models based on dominance and reciprocity

3. Postmodernism

   • Postmodernists pay special attention to texts and speeches, how people talk and write about IR
     • A central idea of postmodernism is that there is no single, objective reality, but a multiplicity of experiences and perspectives that defy easy classification, for this reason, postmodernism itself is difficult to present in a simple or categorical way.
       • Postmoderns want instead to celebrate the diversity of experiences that make up IR without having to make sense of them through simplification and categorization

4. Marxism

   • Historically more important among social theories, they argue that both IR and internal politics arise from unequal relationships between economic classes
     • Marxism is a branch of socialism, a theory that holds that the most powerful classes oppress and exploit the less powerful by denying them their fair share of the surpluses they create. The oppressed classes try to gain power in order to take more advantage of the wealth for themselves.
       • This process, called class struggle, is a way of looking at political relations between rich and poor, and ultimately between the richest and poorest regions of the world.
         • Marxists still believe that the surplus created by labor must be recaptured by the workers through political struggle. Today, Marxism is more influential in the countries of the global South, where capital is scarce and working conditions are bad.

5. Theories of gender

   • In IR, these traditional concepts revolve around the assumptions that males fight wars and execute states, while females are basically irrelevant
     • These gender roles are based on the broader construction of masculinity as in the more public and political spaces, while feminization is associated with the private and domestic sphere.
       • Feminist scholars of IR agree that gender is important in understanding IR but diverge into several strands regarding their conception of the role of gender.
   • What is thought of the woman
     • Because of their greater experience with parenting and human relations, women are seen as potentially more effective than men (on average) in conflict resolution, as well as in group decision making
       • The difference of women is more cultural than the biologically determined
         • Example: some women are physically larger than almost all men, and some men are smaller than almost all women. However, on average, men are somewhat larger than women. In various capacity dimensions, the curve of the woman is above or below that of men on average, but there is still much overlap.
   • Changes
     • After the First World War, the suffrage movement won the right of women to vote
       • Jane Addams and other feminists convened an international peace conference for women in The Hague and founded the Women's Peace Party (now called the International Women's League for Peace and Freedom).
         • In 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, which mandates greater inclusion of women and gender attention in the maintenance and reconstruction of the ON
           • Worldwide, the number of women serving in legislatures is increasing. A 2008 UN report found that women represent more than 18 percent of members of parliaments around the world, up from 7 percent in 1995.
   • Postmodern feminism
     • Postmodern feminism seeks to deconstruct realism with the specific aim of uncovering the pervasive hidden influences of gender in IR while showing how arbitrary the construction of gender roles is.
       • Feminist postmodernists agree with difference feminists that realism car- ries hidden meanings about gender roles but deny that there is any fixed inherent meaning in either male or female genders.