Constructivism in Kratochwil
As one of the original scholars to contribute to constructivist study, Friedrich Kratochwil's constructivist perspective is crucial to the theoretical advancement in the field of international relations. He focused in particular on how political activities relate to norms and how they affect national identities. According to Kratochwil, who emphasises this across all of his works, actions are not just confined to physical ones but can also be found in words (Zehfuss, 2004, pp. 18-19). When Kratochwil asserts that "action is meaningful if it can be placed in an intersubjectively shared context," Zehfuss (2004) explains that Kratochwil is making the observation that this context is "based on and mediated by rules and norms," as "they shape decisions but also give actions meaning and provide people with a medium through which they may communicate."
Thus, international dynamics are driven by acts. According to this constructivist viewpoint, actors' activities maintain or change systems. This is a domestic political process that eventually affects foreign politics. Actions impact internal identities and beliefs, which lead to changes in home norms, and then the alterations are apparent in the global environment (Koslowski & Kratochwil, 1994, p. 216). As an illustration, Koslowski & Kratochwill (1994, p. 215) suggested that revolutions that started in Eastern Europe around 1989 and expanded to the Soviet republics were to blame for the dissolution of the Soviet Union and all its attendant systemic changes. In this context, revolutions are the events that altered regional national identities, eventually rearticulating norms in the Soviet Union and snowballing.
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