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This volume presents twelve original papers on the idea that moral objectivity is to be understood in terms of a suitably constructed social point of view that all can accept. The contributors offer new perspectives, some sympathetic and some critical, on constructivist understandings - Kantian or otherwise - of morality and reason.

Constructivist IR scholars study the ways in which international norms, culture, and identities-all intersubjective phenomena-inform foreign policy and affect the reaction to and outcomes of international events. Political psychologists similarly investigate divergent national self-conceptions as well as the individual cognitive and emotional propensities that shape ideology and policy. Given their mutual interest in human subjectivity and identity politics, a dialogue and synthesis between constructivism and political psychology is long overdue. The contributors to this volume discuss both theoretical and empirical issues of complementarity and critique, with an emphasis on the potential for integrating the viewpoints within a progressive ideational paradigm. Moreover, they make a self-conscious effort to interrogate, rather than gloss over, their differences in the hope that such disagreements will prove particularly rich sources of analytical and empirical insight

"Nicholas Onuf is a leading scholar in international relations and introduced constructivism to international relations, coining the term constructivism in his book World of Our Making (1989). He was featured as one of twelve scholars featured in Iver B. Neumann and Ole Wæver, eds., The Future of International Relations: Masters in the Making? (1996); and featured in Martin Griffiths, Steven C. Roach and M. Scott Solomon, Fifty Key Thinkers in International Relations, 2nd ed. (2009). This powerful collection of essays clarifies Onuf's approach to international relations and makes a decisive contribution to the debates in IR concerning theory. It embeds the theoretical project in the wider horizon of how we understand ourselves and the world. Onuf updates earlier themes and his general constructivist approach, and develops some newer lines of research, such as the work on metaphors and the re-grounding in much more Aristotle than before. A complement to the author's groundbreaking book of 1989, World of Our Making, this tightly argued book draws extensively from philosophy and social theory to advance constructivism in International Relations. Making Sense, Making Worlds will be vital reading for students and scholars of international relations, international relations theory, social theory and law."--Publisher's website

"Dealing with themes of urban planning, constitutionalism, utopianism and social construction theory, this book analyzes the city of Magnesia, Plato's second-best city-state in the Laws, as if it were an actual ancient city-state. The book details the demographics, economics, military capabilities and polity of Magnesia using (post)modern critical theory and contemporary data on ancient city-states. Examining the key features of the proposed city-state in detail, Kenneth Royce Moore considers Plato's proposed military as well as his invention of national service, and compares this with known militaries of the era. The author demonstrates that economic growth is not its priority, highly restricted with an aim toward stability rather than expansion. Moore also considers the Magnesian political system in the light of existing polities of the era, concluding that Magnesia will have a strikingly different form of government than any other actual city-state in antiquity, albeit derived in no small part from Athenian, Cretan and Spartan traditions. This book puts "flesh on the bones" of Plato's fictional utopia and reveals how surprisingly practical it could have been."--Bloomsbury Publishing

Contemporary philosophical pluralism recognizes the inevitability and legitimacy of multiple ethical perspectives and values, making it difficult to isolate the higher-order principles on which to base a theory of justice. Rising up to meet this challenge, Rainer Forst, a leading member of the Frankfurt School's newest generation of philosophers, conceives of an ""autonomous"" construction of justice founded on what he calls the basic moral right to justification.Forst begins by identifying this right from the perspective of moral philosophy. Then, through an innovative, detailed critical anal

In den Sozial-, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten ein konstruktivistischer Grundkonsens entfaltet. Sozialer Sinn, Wissen, Kommunikation, alle Phänomene, mit denen Geltungsansprüche verbunden werden, werden als soziale oder psychische ,Konstruktionen' auf Abstand gehalten. In Abgrenzung haben sich Arbeitsfelder und Zugangsweisen etabliert, die nicht hinter den Reflexionsstand konstruktivistischer Positionen zurückfallen wollen, sondern alternative Absetzungen von den naiv realistischen Vorlagen, die konstruktivistische Einwände provozierten, im Sinne haben. Die AutorInnen setzen sich mit konstruktivistischen Selbstverständlichkeiten im Geiste der Kritik theoretischer Grundlagenreflexion auseinander. Sie untersuchen kumulierte Inkonsistenzen des Konstruktivismus und skizzieren anhand epistemologischer und gegenstandsbezogener Probleme einen postkonstruktivistischen Zugang zu den problematischen Materien dieser Wissenschaften.

Introduction: the foundation of justice -- Practical reason and justifying reasons: on the foundation of morality -- Moral autonomy and the autonomy of morality: toward a theory of normativity after Kant -- Ethics and morality -- The justification of justice: Rawls's political liberalism and Habermas's discourse theory in dialogue -- Political liberty: integrating five conceptions of autonomy -- A critical theory of multicultural toleration -- The rule of reasons: three models of deliberative democracy -- Social justice, justification, and power -- The basic right to justification: toward a constructivist conception of human rights -- Constructions of transnational justice: comparing John Rawls's the law of peoples and Otfried Hoffe's democracy in an age of globalisation -- Justice, morality, and power in the global context -- Toward a critical theory of transnational justice.

The study of the EU's security and defence policy has until now lacked a comprehensive yet thorough and accessible volume on theoretical debates in the field. This timely volume addresses this and is an engaging assessment of the discussions about the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy. It brings together leading scholars in the field who present their respective theoretical viewpoints and illustrate how each has informed their empirical explorations. Pluralistic in its approach, the volume emphasizes the role of conceptual diversity for better explaining the EU's CSDP. It is a broad-range up-to-date survey that speaks to many of the theoretical debates in the field, including mainstream (neorealism, liberal institutionalism and strategic studies, sociological institutionalism), less mainstream (consistent constructivism and structural constructivism) and critical, inspired by neomarxism, Foucauldian approaches and the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

This book bridges scholarly forms of inquiry and practitioners' daily activities. It introduces inquiry as a process of relational construction, offering resources to practitioners who want to reflect on how their work generates practical effects. There are hundreds of books on research, but in keeping with social scientific traditions, many emphasize method and neglect broader, overarching assumptions and interests. Further, most are written in ways that speak to those in the academic community and not to a wider audience of professionals and practitioners. The present text lays out relationa.

The trojan horse : Luhmann's (not so) hidden radicalism -- Why he wrote such bad books -- The fourth insult : a refutation of humanism -- From necessity to contingency : a carnivalization of philosophy -- The last footnote to Plato : a solution to the mind-body problem -- Ecological evolution : a challenge to social creationism -- Constructivism as postmodernist realism : a teaching of differences -- Democracy as a utopia : a deconstruction of politics -- Conclusion : Nec spe nec metu : neither hope nor fear

This volume considers recent studies that move beyond primordialism and its antithesis, social constructivism, to search for new insights to illuminate the nature of nationalism and its link to war. The authors also explore the role of shared interests, the history of peoples, elites and states, political imperatives, propaganda, and psychological predispositions. This combination provides a brillant, new look at nationalism and war-one that delves deeply into ethnic identity and the willingness of people to fight and die for nation-states.

This book offers a concise and detailed analysis of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) foreign aid as a main instrument in its foreign policy. Exploring the cultural factors that have impacted on the foreign policy behaviour of the UAE and its foreign aid, the author argues that Arabism and Islamic traditions have shaped the country's foreign policy in general and foreign aid in particular.Examining in depth the motives and purposes of this large aid program through the lens of International Relations theories (mainly Constructivism and Rationalism), the book details the UAE's foreign policy and a

The book distils and articulates international law as a social construct. It does so by analysing its social foundations, essence, and roots in practical and socially workable (as opposed to 'pure') reason. In addition to well-known doctrines of jurisprudence and international law, it draws upon psycho-analytic insights into the origins and nature of law, as well as philosophical social constructivism. The work suggests that seeing law as a social construct is crucial to ourunderstanding of international law and to the struggle to create better working rules. The book re-conceptualizes both pa

Innovation in the world's institutions and global politics as well as in the physical environment and practices of the contemporary societies has raised the need for specific and up-to-date knowledge about the politics and policies of relief, aid and reconstruction. This book advances the political analysis of international disaster policies which have been mostly in the domain of other social sciences. Exploring the formation of this field of study, this collection analyses the most recent disaster events including the Haiti earthquake, the tsunami in the Pacific Ocean and the genocide in Rwanda and Former Yugoslavia. Broadly linked to constructivism and neo-institutionalism, this book also looks at the impact of these cooperation policies on the governance of the present global system.