Psychology and constructivism together offer new ways of understanding international relations

Trust is a core concept in International Relations (IR), representing a key ingredient in state relations. It was only relatively recently that IR scholars began to probe what trust really is, how it can be studied, and how it affects state relations. In the process three distinct ways of theorising trust in IR have emerged: trust as a rational choice calculation, as a social phenomenon or as a psychological dimension. Trust in International Relations explores trust through these different lenses using case studies to analyse the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. The case studies cover relations between: United States and India ASEAN and Southeast Asian countries Finland and Sweden USA and Egypt The European Union and Russia Turkey’s relations with the West This book provides insights with real-world relevance in the fields of crisis and conflict management, and will be of great interest for students and scholars of IR, security studies and development studies who are looking to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how different theories of trust can be used in different situations.

In international relations (IR), the theory of constructivism argues that the complicated web of international relations is not the result of basic human nature or some other unchangeable aspect but has been built up over time and through shared assumptions. Constructivism Reconsidered synthesizes the nature of and debates on constructivism in international relations, providing a systematic assessment of the constructivist research program in IR to answer specific questions: What extent of (dis)agreement exists with regard to the meaning of constructivism? To what extent is constructivism successful as an alternative approach to rationalism in explaining and understanding international affairs? Constructivism Reconsidered explores constructivism’s theoretical, empirical, and methodological strengths and weaknesses, and debates what these say about its past, present, and future to reach a better understanding of IR in general and how constructivism informs IR in particular.

Realism and constructivism, two key contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of international relations, are commonly taught as mutually exclusive ways of understanding the subject. Realist Constructivism explores the common ground between the two, and demonstrates that, rather than being in simple opposition, they have areas of both tension and overlap. There is indeed space to engage in a realist constructivism. But at the same time, there are important distinctions between them, and there remains a need for a constructivism that is not realist, and a realism that is not constructivist. Samuel Barkin argues more broadly for a different way of thinking about theories of international relations, that focuses on the corresponding elements within various approaches rather than on a small set of mutually exclusive paradigms. Realist Constructivism provides an interesting new way for scholars and students to think about international relations theory.

Publisher Description

The Oxford Handbook of International Relations offers the most authoritative and comprehensive overview to date of the field of international relations. Arguably the most impressive collection of international relations scholars ever brought together within one volume, the Handbook debates the nature of the field itself, critically engages with the major theories, surveys a wide spectrum of methods, addresses the relationship between scholarship and policy making, and examines the field's relation with cognate disciplines. The Handbook takes as its central themes the interaction between empirical and normative inquiry that permeates all theorizing in the field and the way in which contending approaches have shaped one another. In doing so, the Handbook provides an authoritative and critical introduction to the subject and establishes a sense of the field as a dynamic realm of argument and inquiry. The Oxford Handbook of International Relations will be essential reading for all of those interested in the advanced study of global politics and international affairs.

An ambitious new book by one of the world's leading International relations scholars, in which he develops a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to trust and applies this framework to the issue of building trust at the international level.