The Social Constructivist Sensibility and CSDP Research

Abstract

This chapter revisits the consistent constructivist perspective on knowledge production. It examines how substantive research problems can be approached through it and shows how a constructivist approach can be heuristically fruitful for the analysis of the European Union’s (EU) Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). It restates the basic premises of constructivism and explicates how constructivism is well equipped for the study of politics across levels. Rather than hoping for an incontrovertible foundation on which all knowledge is based or for a world that can be described from one ‘correct’ perspective, constructivism accepts the situatedness of all research and the need to make the perspective in the generation of knowledge explicit. Since we cannot see the world as it really is as all knowledge is filtered through our conceptual lenses, we never ‘test’ against the ‘world’ but only against other theories. This has important implications for our epistemological claims and for the methodologies we choose. Epistemologically, we must realise that ‘truth’ is not an attribute of the ‘things out there’ but an attribute of theoretical statements about the world. Methodologically, we have to understand that neither stringent deduction nor inference or generalisation provide the via regia for the generation of warranted knowledge. Instead, the abductive logic of inquiry appears to match constructivist sensibilities. The chapter identifies a set of substantive dimensions of a constructivist research design that contribute to a better understanding of the emergence and development of CSDP. It then applies these principles in three research vignettes on CSDP.