Between Conflict And Cooperation: Constructivism As A Metatheory

The Ph.D. dissertation intends to answer two major theoretical questions - under what conditions an actor's preference is prone to change and how it changes? To what extent the change affects the actor's perception of power and interest in dealing with international relations?In the beginning, the dissertation reviews two different processes of identity and preference formation, the convergent identity process, which leads to cooperative preference and the discrete identity process to conflicting preference. The convergent identity of self, which presumes external others as partners, constructs actor's preference to cooperation. Then, the coming up self/other encounters guided by such a preference create, undergird and reify a Kantian culture in the system, which, in turn, encourage actors to learn and internalize the norms of cooperation. A system with such a culture is more likely to take a progressive evolution toward a state of peace, a process which the liberalist constructivism provides with a better understanding.On the other hand, the discrete identity of self, which presumes external others hostile, constructs actors'preference to conflict. Then, the coming up self/other encounters guided by such a preference can only create, undergird and reify a systemic culture of power politics, which, in turn, drive actors to learn and internalize the norms advocating violence and competition. A system with such a culture would inevitably take a retrogressive evolution to a state of conflict, a process which the realist constructivism attempts to explain.Despite of their contributions to the understanding of these two evolutionary processes of international politics, both liberal constructivism and realist constructivism ignore the theoretical questions of how identities change and how the changes affect actors'preference formation. To make up the deficiency, the dissertation seeks to establish a complex constructivism framework, which hypothesizes that the systemic structure, that agents interact within, is constituted by both material and ideational factors; different configurations of the factors propel agents to follow different modes of interactions, which lead to different identity and preference formation.Maintaining that structure and agents are mutually constituted, the dissertation takes a structurationist approach to analyze the interactions between structure and agents. It studies carefully the history of European international relations from 1945 to 2009 and the recent crisis in Darfur, the former of which shows a configuration favoring progressive evolution to peace and the latter favoring retrogressive evolution to conflict, and found that to legitimately control the use of force and to effectively socialize agents in the system are two major factors determining a positive direction of the evolutionary process.