Conventional and Critical Constructivist Approaches to National Security

Abstract

This article aims to consider two different (or contentious) constructivist approaches to national security in the study of international relations: conventional constructivist security studies, on the one hand, and critical constructivist security studies on the other. In so doing, this article will examine both constructivisms’ main assumptions and core concepts, such as norms, socialization, identity, culture, identity/difference, discourse, and so on. Of these concepts, special attention is paid to the concepts of “culture”and “identity”by investigating the question of how conventional and critical constructivists understand those concepts in crucially different ways in their respective researches relating to national security. The key difference -- to be exact, tension -- between the two variants of constructivism is that identities are often treated as explanatory variables for certain security phenomena in conventional constructivism, but in critical constructivism the identities themselves are to be explained to make sense of the cultural productions of insecurities.