Constructivism (Kelsey Hunter, Week 5 Substantive)

After reading both Wendt and Jackson, the ideas of the agent-structure problem and structure vs. process became much clearer to me. The way I understood things from Wendt's discussion of "anarchy is what states make of it," ideas such as "self-help" and "power politics" are actually institutions constructed from the processes of states interactions in an anarchic system. Through the identity a state creates it will exhibit certain behaviors and act in a certain way in reaction to anarchy. As Jackson would describe it, constructivism is concerned with the "activities that continually produce and reproduce an actor (NATO) and how these activities give rise to observed social actions carried out in [the actor's] name" (142). So the actor creates its own identity and its actions reinforce that identity, especially those actions of legitimation.

I'm not sure what I think of this idea yet. Both Wendt and Jackson go about their arguments in very different ways, with Wendt systematically building an argument against Neorealism and bridging the gap to Neoliberalism and Jackson applying constructivism empirically to the idea that state's can use rhetoric as a strategy to legitimate themselves through the example of the NATO bombing campaign. It seems to me as if this is almost a chicken and egg problem, with the actions leading to the actor or the actor creating the identity that leads to the behavior. I think I may need to have this explained to me a bit more today in class.