the-evolution-of-international-security-studies

constructivisms: norms, identities and narratives 199language game (Fierke, 1996: 473). Comparing the war to ‘the SecondWorld War’, ‘Vietnam’, the ‘Gulf War’ or ‘the First World War’ thus constituteddifferent identities for the Bosnian parties and for the West andsuggested which policies could or should be carried out. Conductinga historical case-study, Weldes (1996, 1999) contrasted the official USdiscourse on the Cuba Missile Crisis with Cuban and Soviet representationsto illustrate the contestability of material facts, such as missiles.And Mutimer (1998) analysed how practices and narratives of proliferationcontrol spread from nuclear proliferation to chemical, biological andchemical weapons after the end of the Cold War. Crucially, to constitutethese weapons through ‘disarmament’, ‘market economy’ or ‘a war ondrugs’ discourse rather than ‘proliferation’ would reorient the constitutionsof objects, identities and interests and hence what policies shouldbe adopted.The concern with the construction of identity and the link betweenrepresentations and policy in Critical Constructivism means that thereare obvious similarities to Poststructuralism (see chapter 5 and the sectionbelow). There are, however, also differences between the two approaches.First, in that Critical Constructivists often examine language games ornarratives from a logical or hypothetical perspective rather than, as domost Poststructuralists, from an empirical one (Wæver, 2004a). This logicaldeduction provides the language games identified with a free-standingor self-contained quality which makes transitions and variations harderto explain (Fierke, 2000 seeks to address this). Second, the conceptionof identity is slightly more Constructivist than Poststructuralist. CriticalConstructivists speak about states as actors, not as discursively constitutedsubjects, and there is sometimes a slippage between ‘identity’and ‘role’ (Mutimer, 1998: 113). This implies that identity is somethingthat a state (or others) has, and which ‘it’ explicitly defines and pursues(Mitzen, 2006), or a property that it can decide to protect or ‘kill off’ (Mattern,2001). For Poststructuralists identity is discursively constituted, andwhile states (or rather those speaking on behalf of states) construct andmobilise identity when legitimating foreign policies, identity is not anentity that can be fully controlled. Third, Critical Constructivists oftenestablish identities on the basis of explicit words or concepts found in thetexts examined; Mutimer (1998), for example, identifies the identities ofthe proliferation discourse as ‘suppliers’ and ‘recipients’. Poststructuralistsusually trace how such terms are linked to more deep-seated identitiessuch as civilised/barbaric, Western/Oriental, democratic/despoticand rational/irrational.