International relations an der TU München

Constructivism: Globalization with real changes to create cross-national human rights and social movements also through communication via internet

• Human beings can be improved, democracy is necessary for liberal improvement, ideas matter
• Belief in progress
• War is the natural condition of world politics
• Are states the main actors on the world political stage? Individuals, multinational corporations, transnational actors and IOs as central actors
• States as a collective preference of individuals --> no national interest
• Key issue: devising international institutions --> coorperation
• Order in world politics: not balance of power but interactions among many layers of governing arrangements, comprising laws, agreed norms, international regimes, institutional rules
• Sovereignty not of significant importance (achievements just through negotiation, limited freedom of one’s sovereign state)
• Interdependence critically important feature of world politics

• Approach that arose after the disintegration of the Soviet empire and fall of the Berlin Wall; not a theory of world politics but rather philosophy of social science
• Make and re-make social world --> human agency
• Human progress and betterment of people’s lives
• World politics seen as something we can change
• In international relations, constructivism is the claim that significant aspects of international relations are historically and socially constructed, rather than inevitable consequences of human nature or other essential characteristics of world politics

• Postmodernism
• Concerned with distrusting and exposing any account of human life that claims to have direct access to the truth --> all power requires knowledge and all knowledge relies on and reinforces existing power relations --> no truth existing outside of power --> truth as part of social settings (is not external to social settings)
• Takes apart the very concepts and methods of our thinking, examining the conditions and under which we are able to theorize about world politics in the first place

• not Eurocentric
• can other Eurocentric theories really purport to explain world politics as a whole or world politics as it relates to the lives to the lives of most people on the planet --> more likely to forward the Western’s interests when it comes to justifying military and economic subordination of the global South --> Neo-colonialism
• claims that realism and liberalism are not neutral in terms of race, gender and class
• Global hierarchies of subordination and control (past and present) are enabled through the historical construction and combination of racial, gendered and class differences and hierarchies

• No defined theory
• Construction of differences between women and men in the context of hierarchy and power 
• Gender affects world politics and world politics affects gender
• How are women excluded from power and prevented from playing a full part in political activity?
• Inequality due to capitalist system? Women rated as a particular class rather than economic standing