The Role of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies in International Relations.

As constructivists and other advocates of constitutive theories have often noted, the natural world is very different from the social one. Our ideas about the social world not only reflect that world, but help shape and create it; we are part of the reality we try to describe and explain, not external to it, and we therefore have the potential to alter the reality a theory is merely intended to describe or explain. Our theories about the social world may thus become self-fulfilling prophecies or autogenetic in character. And yet while constructivists often make this point in epistemological debate, there have been relatively few attempts so far to address its empirical implications. With that objective in mind, this paper examines three prominent IR theories – the democratic peace theory, the interdependence equals peace thesis and the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis – arguing that each has a self-fulfilling character rather than being true or false in any objective or timeless sense; each is, to paraphrase the now time-honored expression, what the relevant actors make of it. The paper also probes the processes by which theories become self-generating, stressing the role of opinion entrepreneurs in fashioning explanatory and predictive theories which become popularized – usually because they seem to fit the nature of the times in some way - so that people begin to believe that a theory explains reality in a naturalistic sense and that its predictions are therefore bound to hold. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]