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Traditional descriptions of state behavior (and, in particular, realism) focus on power and national interests as explanatory variables. Constructivists take a different view, looking at how state interests and identity are constructed and communicated. This paper looks at a difficult case for realists ? large-scale superpower military failure ? and answers the question: How do superpowers explain failure? The paper discusses the cases of two failures: the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. How do leaders of superpowers present a lost war, and, in particular, how do they use television to tell the story? The answer to this question involves understanding why leaders believed they had to explain anything at all, and how they shaped the manner in which the story was told. This, then, directly addresses the literature on constructivism and international relations. What is particularly interesting about these cases is how similar the stories were, despite the differences in political and media systems. The paper covers the time periods associated with the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam (January 20, 1969 until March 29, 1973) and Soviet troops from Afghanistan (between Gorbachev’s announcement on February 8, 1988 to February 15, 1989). Extensive use of American archival data and memos, including daily news summaries completed by White House staff member Patrick Buchanan with handwritten comments and orders by President Nixon, give a fascinating picture of the American President’s media strategy and rationale. The Soviet case incorporates information obtained from interviews with Soviet leaders and television officials, recent archival data, and content analyses of Soviet television. The paper argues that leadership communication strategies, including how leaders frame the story of withdrawal from a failed war, must be understood by focusing on both domestic political considerations and concerns about international identity and the ability to project power. Policy legitimacy, public opinion, and elite bargaining are certainly important, but do not entirely explain why and how leaders account for failure. For example, leaders must balance domestic considerations with perceived international imperatives; Soviet and American leaders alike believed they had particular responsibilities related to interests and power in the international system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do ideas play in the establishment and maintenance of hegemony? The proposed paper seeks to answer these questions by building upon the model of international relations (Role Realignment theory) described in International Political Science Review 24/1 (January 2003), and refined in The Precarious Balance Revisited: The War on Terrorism and System Transformation (CEISA/ISA Conference, Budapest, 26-28 June 2003). The paper will explore the proposition that this theory sheds light on the process of endogenous norm generation in international relations. The model incorporates ideas/ideology as endogenous variables alongside traditional measures of power in a closed-system model that emphasizes the process dynamics through which ideas/ideologies compete for acceptance/dominance in international relations. The four major variables (foreign policy role elements) are operationalized using metrics that can be tested historically, producing an explanatory rather than a normative theory. Findings will emphasize U.S. foreign policy role behavior and its impact on America’s leading role in world affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the public choice school, which has dominated the debate on metropolitan governance since the 1980s, is facing new intellectual challenges. Like the reformers during the first half of the 20th Century, many urban scholars and practitioners are again demanding more integrated governance structures for sprawling metropolitan areas. There are also fundamental differences between the early reformers and the current advocates of a new regionalism in metropolitan areas. The new conceptions can be seen as the latest step in a dialectic development of governance paradigms. Whereas the early reformers adopted a technocratic, "steering" perspective and proposed a consolidated regional city, the public choice advocates relied on an individualistic "choice" approach to propose decentralized and (territorially or functionally) fragmented government structures. The latest turn of the debate goes beyond a pure instrumentalist view on political institutions which is embodied in both traditions. Social constructivists understand the attempts for "boundary (re)drawing", which is at the core of all metropolitan reform plans, primarily as a process of constructing/ constitutionalizing individual and collective identities. This paper presents an analysis of distinct definitions of fundamental governance goals and the corresponding proposals for institutional design. Very different understandings of "democracy" can be described in Abraham Lincoln’s terms: Early reformers based their plans on a top-down perspective on democracy as "government for the people", rational choice advocates stress the bottom-up concept of "government by the people" and social constructivists focus their attention on "government of the/of what people" - an aspect which is gaining center stage in a world where socio-economic and cultural spaces of flows are superposing traditional spaces of place. The formula for economic success has changed from focusing on effectiveness (a concept based on welfare theory) over efficiency (based on political economy) to competitiveness (based on trade theory). Dominant definitions of social justice have been transformed from equality over equivalence to equity/difference. The paper uses those different definitions of core values and the corresponding proposals for institutional design to analyze the discourse on institutional reform in metropolitan areas in the United States from the 1950s to the year 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three decades ago, most Western nations experienced a shift in health policy. While downplaying their belief in treatment technology, the potentials of preventive public health were suddenly viewed upon with unbridled optimism. As a Canadian report argued in 1974, this potential required governments to 'get into the business of modifying behavior', i.e. to counter lifestyle diseases by getting citizens to exercise more, but eat, drink, and smoke less than they used to.Despite the clear and early identification of goals and target groups, the experience of public health policy has been less than successful. Many citizens in the developed world already know what they are supposed to do and yet they almost never conform with the goals of policy makers in the field. What accounts for this gap? Is it because citizens never listen, or is the goal setting of public health policy to blame? This paper seeks to advance our understanding of policy failures in public health and other forms of preemptive action. The paper is motivated by the view that the interaction of knowledge and politics is currently an underdeveloped topic in the public policy literature, partly because knowledge is often reduced to a somewhat technical input factor. Undertheorized in public policy is both what knowledge is and what it does for the evaluation of policy success or failure. As the public health case illustrates, there is no linear relation between knowledge, governmental action, and successful changes to individual behavior.In order to improve policy theory on the topic of knowledge, this paper combines a more traditional style of public policy case comparison with ideas drawn from a Foucauldian perspective on knowledge, power and subjectivity. Clearly associated with discourse analysis, this latter perspective focuses on how various knowledge forms structure our conception of healthy citizens and the prospects of governmental action.Based on a larger study of public health documents in the United States and Denmark between 1975 and 2005, this paper demonstrates that two highly different systems of health care and welfare provision has experienced similar difficulties in putting knowledge into action. This similarity supports the claim that there is a proprietary logic of policy failure within this area, part of which has to do with governing through knowledge, and part of which is due to the preventive character of this policy area.The experience of policy failure generates new health promoting instruments, and in particular both countries have shifted its efforts from reporting statistical knowledge to focus much more on strategically designed forms of health communication. This result leaves public health policy in a normative dilemma, however, because while policy makers generally seek to give individuals more responsibility for their own health status, their communication is predesigned on the premise that people do not listen and are not able to meet the responsibility handed to them. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What US post-Cold War strategies towards potential nuclear proliferant countries have been most successful and why? Two answers to this question have been given: a realist answer in which the outcome of strategies is determined by the balance of expected material (military and economic) benefits and sanctions, and a constructivist answer that posits social (prestige, status, and role) benefits and sanctions as the determinants of success or failure. In this paper, through analysis of the two US-DPRK nuclear crises, I argue that neither of these answers is sufficient; both social and material tools must be used in concert and in the right way in order to provide the proper balance of incentives and disincentives to slow proliferation. I elaborate realist and constructivist frameworks, testing deterrent (negative-feedback) and spiral (positive-feedback) models of interaction. I break down interactions into individual events using both content and discourse analysis, then connect these interactions to nuclear moves by North Korea. I analyze events coded into the IDEA framework, enabling separation of the material and social implications of each event. I then use vector autoregression to uncover action-reaction cycles between the United States and North Korea. Furthermore, I analyze the discourse that surrounds these events qualitatively in order to uncover complex multiple-country causal patterns and domestic-international interactions. I connect these interaction patterns to nuclear outcomes and find that a combination of social benefits and clear, coherent, and credible material deterrence is effective in slowing nuclear proliferation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructivist theories of securitization are built on a foundation of communicative action tenets. While this represents an important and innovative advance in international relations theory, securitization ignores some of the components involved in a successful communicative act. Williams (2003) calls for securitization theory to incorporate the hitherto ignored effects of mass media and in this paper we answer this call. We first show that securitization's specification of leaders' speech acts and audiences' legitimative discourse presumes mass media actors are indifferent in how they convey leader representations and justifications of crises. We take this presumption as an empirical question and execute a study of whether the national presses of ally countries differently emphasized the frames Bush invoked in their news coverage of key September 11th speeches. We show from comparisons of chi-square distributions and regression analyses that, far from being passive conveyers of speech frames, the national presses of the US, Canada, France, Britain and Ireland (1) did not convey all of Bush's securitizing problem representations and response justifications proportionate to the extent Bush invoked them in his speeches, and (2) that for each national press factors based on professional norms and/or organizational routines increased the likelihood that a speech sentence would be conveyed in a news story. We discuss the implications of our findings for how securitization theory should conceptualize media actors when redressing this gap in its explanatory models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the military and economic rise of China a threat to powers such as Japan and the United States? This paper examines this question using the theoretical predictions of realist theories (classical realism, neo-realism, and power transition theory), liberal theories (classical liberalism and neo-liberalism), and constructivist theory. While the qualitative analysis of Chinese, American, and Japanese behavior indicates some support for each theory, classical liberalism and constructivism are most strongly supported by the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the 'mainstreaming' of constructivism in IR, the 'social turn' overlooks a crucial component of social life - the ordinary interactions that form the frequent and most common opportunity for dialogue among international actors. In this paper, I argue that ordinary interactions, like the creation of an Economic Partnership Commission to enhance and deepen US-Turkish partnership shortly after 9/11, are at the core of social processes. These interactions matter because they demonstrate how actors make their relations meaningful through a common language; one that relies on a re-engagement with the relevant past events familiar to participants. The 'trade talk' between the US and Turkey in 2002 relied on re-telling the past in order to make the economic negotiations meaningful. Events are not static 'things' in need of explanation or prediction, but rather elements of meaning-making and common knowledge. Ironically, then, events are extremely significant elements of the ordinary. By emphasizing how events are used as elements of story, I demonstrate the socially productive possibilities of the everyday. This requires close attention to narratives and I develop a methodology loosely based on David Campbell's work to examine how the articulated past events that appear in the narratives told to me in my personal interviews with US and Turkish elites in 2003 are formative of common knowledge and sense-making in international relations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While almost a decade old, Ted Hopf's observation that the democratic peace is an observation in search of a theory still has some validity. In particular, the mechanisms behind the observed lack of war between democracies are poorly understood, making it difficult for scholars to provide a compelling explanation. While there has been some innovative work, particularly with respect to learning and the ability of an increasing number of democracies to cement democratic norms, Müller and Wolff note that normative and structural explanations are monadic explanations for a dyadic phenomenon. Underappreciated in the existing work is the role of identity and the importance this has for driving the democratic peace. With a focus on developing a dyadic democratic peace mechanism and using a case study approach, this paper utilizes the Copenhagen School's securitization framework to examine how identity plays out in the U.S. response to the Indian and Iranian nuclear programs. It finds that in fact identity does play a significant role in how security policy is constructed. The potential implications of this finding, particularly on policy, are significant. If the democratic peace does rely on identity to trigger the constraining norms that limit the escalation of conflict to violence, it is unlikely the democratic peace can be spread by force and it is possible that states nominally democratic can be excluded from the community of democracies if their behavior or significant other aspects of their perceived identity are at variance with the accepted democratic identity standard. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, part of a broader research project, is concerned with the question of how military intervention as part of the 'war on terror' was justified in the three core members of the 'Coalition of the Willing': the US, UK and Australia. In particular, we focus on the ways in which interventions in Iraq were justified to domestic audiences across these states. Building on critical constructivist understandings of security, we suggest the importance of conceiving of security discourse and policy as an intersubjective realm. Within this realm, the ability to legitimise or enable particular foreign and security practices is related to the extent to which these practices are located within dominant narratives of history, culture and identity within the political communities concerned. While political leaders in these three states therefore defined the need for intervention in broadly similar terms, subtle differences in emphasis and argumentation are potentially important not only in communicating how the military interventions themselves are made possible in different contexts, but also in illuminating the possibilities and constraints for discourses and practices of security in global politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate between France and the U.S. leading up to the 2003 war in Iraq highlighted two very different interpretations of the same principle of international law: the use of anticipatory action in self-defense. This paper examines the question of how states arrive at different interpretations of international law, theorizing that the method of interpretation a state adopts is constituted by the legal tradition of that state. Legal tradition is the historical development of law within a state that results in socially constructed beliefs about the role of law in society, the proper creation of law, and the sources of law that are binding. A state's legal tradition not only shapes how state decision-makers view law generally, but also provides the framework for which international legal principles become internalized into the domestic law. Each of these attributes contributes to the perception state decision-makers have towards law, which in turn shapes how they interpret existing international law. To test this theory, I conduct four of case studies examining the way legal tradition shaped interpretation of the international law of anticipatory intervention in self-defense. I use the contemporary example of the debates over intervention in Iraq as a focal point for this examination. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the first systematic analysis of the linkage between cultural worldviews, partisanship, and the making of U.S. foreign policy. Although partisan disagreement over foreign policy reflects the interplay of complex causes, ideological and cultural divergence has been at a minimum salient and at a maximum determinative of foreign policy differences in the post-Cold War era. Since the Cold War ended, America's political parties have demonstrated foreign policy preferences that differ in consistent and coherent ways that correspond to the distinctive cultural worldviews that underlie and differentiate them from each other. Embedded in this observation are three supporting claims that this study synthesizes and supports through a systematic overview of foreign policy "key votes" taken from the Congressional Quarterly Almanac between 1989 and 2004. First, partisanship exerts a discernible influence in foreign-policymaking. That is, the parties will choose different policy options under the same circumstances in at least some cases and do so in consistent ways. Second, the parties can be differentiated from each other by reference to their underlying cultural worldviews in a manner consistent with expectations identified in recent studies of partisan polarization. In other words, the parties look at the world from distinct cultural perspectives that yield different value judgments and policy preferences, including in the foreign policy realm. Third, cultural worldviews matter to the conceptualization of U.S. foreign policy and the definition of the national interest. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sanctions on Iraq (1990-2003) posed an excruciating moral and strategic political dilemma. The sanctions caused immense human suffering, while doing little to unseat Saddam Hussein from power. For some, this reality created an urgent moral imperative to lift the sanctions immediately, at whatever cost. But given the absolute brutality of Saddam's regime, lifting the sanctions - and awarding the tyrant a significant political victory - seemed at best a problematic moral stance. Saddam bore some responsibility for the horrific effects of the sanctions, both in his refusal to comply fully with UN disarmament resolutions and in his cynical manipulation of the flow of humanitarian relief for his own domestic and foreign political ends. The difficult moral decisions were compounded by perplexing strategic concerns. The sanctions succeeded in preventing Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, and significantly weakened Iraqi military capabilities, but at the same time actually strengthened Saddam's domestic position, and by the late 1990s had evolved into a potent instrument of Iraqi foreign policy. Because sanctions are often presented as an 'ethical' or 'humane' alternative to war, they carry a particular moral burden which makes them an easy target for accusations of hypocrisy. This paper argues that the distinctively moral tone of the international argument about Iraq explains otherwise puzzling outcomes: the empowering of an otherwise quite weak transnational activist network; the rhetorical entrapment of the United States and the UK into backing the creation of an unprecedented humanitarian relief programme within the sanctions regime ("Oil for Food"); the sudden collapse of compliance with the sanctions in the late 1990s; and ultimately the failure of the United States to win international backing for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The strategic payoffs to moral argument generated great incentives for hypocrisy, which had the unfortunate result of stripping away the very possibility of generating legitimacy not only for the sanctions, but for virtually any policy towards Iraq. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a model of how foreign policy implementation produces rules of international security. It focuses on the Proliferation Security Initiative as an illustrative case study. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postwar officials in Japan, like their counterparts in Germany, faced the daunting task of rebuilding their country’s relationships with other states and of placing these relations on a new foundation to replace the discredited politics of their recent past. In these circumstances, Konrad Adenauer and the CDU in Germany moved quickly to cement alliance ties with the West, to pursue broader institutional arrangements in Europe, and to commit themselves in general to arrangements that limited rather than reasserted the power of the German state. Superficially, Japan appears to have followed a similar course through its defense pact with the U.S. and its constitutional renunciation of military forces. Yet Japan’s decisive postwar Prime Minister, Shigeru Yoshida, embraced none of these goals. Although he sought strict limits on the Japanese military establishment, he was eager to reassert the power and sovereign right of the Japanese state. Moreover, he embraced the international commitments of the Defense Treaty only with great reluctance. And, even so, he was roundly criticized for having gone too far. A constructivist analysis of language, rules, and order helps to account for Japan’s postwar choices. Trying to find its place in a new international order, Japan confronted a specific instance of a generic problem of order. Speech act theory identifies three strategic pathways for managing such problems, leading to three different cultures of order: Hobbesian (or directive), Lockean (or assertive), and Kantian (or commissive). Postwar circumstances ruled out one of these, the Hobbesian strategy, in Japan (and Germany). Despite their similar structural positions, Japan and Germany made different choices from among the remaining alternatives--choices that continue to reverberate in contemporary Japanese and German foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This project combines social theories concerning communicative action and the influence of culture on states’ security policies to examine multinational crisis management in the Balkans through the 1990s. By examining how the United States, Russia, Great Britain, Germany, and France collaborated in response to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo I have been able to isolate specific, security-related cultural incompatibilities that contributed to their inability to collaborate quickly and effectively. My central claim is that each state possesses a distinct ‘security-related culture? that provides state leaders with understandings about which actions are possible, appropriate, and favorable. How these understandings are articulated in different institutional settings account for whether collaboration will proceed effectively or contentiously.? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the end of the Cold War, the Japanese Government started the dispatch of the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) for overseas missions that do not require the use of force. I argue that collective identity formation in the U.S.-Japan Alliance is an important factor to comprehend the transformation of Japan’s security policy in the post-Cold War Period. In this paper, collective identity is defined as “identification with other states on the basis of mutual trust in terms of non-violence and mutual aid.” My main method is the content analysis of public documents such as join communique, joint declaration, joint statement and Japan’s Defense White Papers, partially by using a computer program. In the case of the U.S.-Japan Alliance, I analyze its behavioral component – cooperative interaction in policy consultation, joint exercises, joint research, and cost sharing; and the attitudinal component – the consensus among group members about basic values, external threats, strategic goals, and strategic means. In addition, I attempt to trace chronological change in the description of Japan by Japanese policymakers. The evidence shows that since the end of the Cold War, collective identity has become stronger between Japanese and American policymakers in the national security field. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the results of an action research project which focuses on chat room communication at a metropolitan university in the United States. Students in a first year composition course were tasked with taking lecture notes during class solely utilizing online course software, specifically the chat room feature. An analysis of the chat transcript revealed how students organically situated knowledge construction in a virtual context. Examining the individual and group thought processes of the students, along with the questions that they asked, provided the instructor with an avenue for extended classroom conversation and future lesson planning. Additionally, student feedback and participation in the chat room has established the parameters for an extended research project into the tenants of constructivism in virtual learning environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Without a doubt, public opinion on homosexuality has become more favorable over the past couple of decades, has it not? This paper calls into question this broad generalization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 revealed to many Americans the unsettling truth that national power does not necessarily produce security--that the United States’ technological sophistication and dependence on global trade made it simultaneously more powerful and more vulnerable. As it was shaped by U.S. political leaders, this sudden, shocking consciousness of insecurity led to a profound change in U.S. political culture, as international terrorism quickly came to occupy a place in the American psyche akin to the monolithic global threats of the Soviet and Nazi eras. The social context created by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s framing of the new reality facing American foreign policy are critical variables in understanding the course of American foreign relations since then. From the days immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration presented a clear, coherent vision of the world in its public pronouncements, constructing an image of reality which defined the identity of the United States, its enemies, and the rest of the world in ways which served to enable subsequent foreign policy. Realist analyses which describe the evolution of U.S. foreign policy in this era in terms of material capabilities and interests alone are not sufficient in understanding the process. Constructivist perspectives which acknowledge the role of ideology and identity construction in the years since 9/11 era are necessary for a full understanding of this change. This paper will assert that a set of core assumptions were the critical ingredients in the Bush administration’s construction of the post-9/11 world: that the promotion of democracy and peace were central goals of American identity and foreign policy; that America itself was profoundly vulnerable to extant but invisible threats, both internationally and domestically; that the world was divided into two camps, loosely defined as “civilization” versus “terrorism” or barbarism; that individuals and groups in the “terrorist” camp were irrational and, by virtue of their rejection of civilized norms, not fully human; that opposition to terrorism and undemocratic governments was a continuation of the United States historic opposition to fascism and other forms of totalitarianism; and that other states which ought to be in the U.S. camp might or might recognize their duty to defend freedom, imposing a moral obligation on the United States to act whether or not international consensus could be reached. The Bush administration’s successful assertion of this vision of reality created the political environment which allowed post-9/11 American foreign policy in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, to be carried out. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructivists define meaningful learning as active, constructive (reflective), intentional, authentic and cooperative. Nursing education has gone through three distinct stages in the last century in the U.S.: the apprenticeship model, the university-based model, and a contemporary model using simulation. This paper will take a fresh look at the three models of nursing education to explore the extent to which each model contains these elements of meaningful learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the divide in ethical theorizing between deontological and consequentialist traditions, I argue that for most international relations scholars concerned with ethical argument, the deontological and the consequentialist concerns are intimately linked. One reason that many constructivist norms scholars have focused so clearly on careful empirical research is that we believe (at least implicitly) that we need to know something about the empirical consequences of norms in order to judge their ethical desirability. But we lack more explicit and systematic guidelines about how to link principles and consequences in ethical argument. My discussion examines related questions of consequences, comparison, and counterfactuals to try to offer some insights for normative thinking from the realm of empirical constructivism. I illustrate my arguments with reference to two current human rights issues: the debate over the U.S. use of torture and the debate over the impact of the increasing use of global human rights trials. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work seeks to fill a gap in our knowledge by examining how military institutions of different states socially interact to shape the international system in such a way as to lessen the need to coerce, threaten, and impose. The analysis focuses on how states might be socialized in an identity-based sense through the purposeful US military effort to socialize fellow militaries through US military educational exchanges and other military-to-military interactions. The research design uses a positivist methodology to test its constructivist argument. The study finds US military engagement activities to be positively and systematically associated with liberalizing trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When considering the nature of US hegemony and power, the influence of the US military is stereotypically viewed in terms of combat capability and its use to either deter aggression or defeat adversaries. Recent military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq reinforce this distinctively realist perspective of US military power. However, the US military might also contribute to a more democratic, and thus more peaceful, international system through constructivist type mechanisms. US foreign policy assumptions and military strategies based on engagement, suggest that US military contacts, and the normative influence they might exert, have a positive effect on promoting professional militaries as well as socializing foreign military officers to democratic norms and practices. This study spans the years 1972-2000 and uses survival/hazard analysis techniques to explore the socializing influence exerted (or not) through US military engagement activities on the political identity of states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]