Week 5 – Constructivism and Terrorism

I was thinking about suitable topics to blog about during week 5. After all the Waltz and Wendt readings are one of my favorites and I remembered them from my BA. A good topic to flesh out the constructivist theory and at the same time dismiss the traditional realism theory is terrorism. Since the 9/11 attacks, traditional theories like realism struggled to understand the War on Terror, al-Qaeda strategies, or Islamic ideologies. Rationalist approaches such as Realism, or even Liberalism could not explain the 9/11 attacks, which were clearly motivated by religious convictions. Hence, constructivism seems closest in evaluating terrorism.

Even though I lack the ability to summarize enough reasoning for this opinion into this blog post, however, my argument is that the basic nature of terrorism is a social construct. I would argue this, because a social construct also always includes various identities and also culture. The 9/11 attacks showed us, that it is necessary to emphasize the importance of understanding culture, identity, religion, and ideas.

In Alexander Wendts’ article, he emphasizes “the impact of ideas and identities, how they are created, how they evolve and shape the way states respond to a situation” – all those which were overlooked by the Rationalists. Constructivism is often identified through Wendt’s central thought –“anarchy is what states make of it.” Wendt believes that anarchy is socially constructed by individual states, based on their identities and how they create their own security dilemmas. Wendt further claims that a state’s construction of anarchy is based on how it sees “the self and the other” through its shared cultural understandings that “arise out of interactions.”

Even though Wendt’s argument is related to inter-state interactions, I think that the idea can be extended to the interaction between state and terrorist actor as well.

So, why is terrorism constructed? I think it is socially constructed, because it is not something in the real world, something that always has pre-existed.  Further, the definition of terrorism depends on the viewer; what might be a terrorist to one person is a liberator to another.