![]() Shifts in the balance of power repeatedly disrupt international order, with rising powers challenging the rules and fading powers struggling to hold on. Kissinger hasn’t forgotten about power, of course. States internalized these norms to different degrees, and related to others not only through the balance of power but also in social terms such as “Friend” and “Enemy.” Wendt and a generation of constructivists showed that realist assumptions about the iron logic of anarchy and the security dilemma represented only one possible type of international order. For Wendt, foreign policies are shaped profoundly and inextricably by the type of international order within which states existed: Hobbesian orders, anarchic and militaristic Lockean orders, rule-governed and predictable or Kantian orders, closely integrated by shared norms and democratic institutions. That’s the sort of question that could have served as an epitaph for Alexander Wendt’s foundational work of constructivist international relations theory, “ Social Theory of International Politics.” Wendt’s outline of a systemic constructivist alternative to realism defined multiple possible international orders in terms of precisely such terms. ![]()
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