PART I
ALEXANDER WENDT
Wendt’s constructivist conception of social structures
First, social structures are defined, in part, by shared
understandings, expectations, or knowledge. These
constitute the actors in a situation and the nature of
their relationships, whether cooperative or conflictual. A
security dilemma, for example, is a social structure
composed of intersubjective understandings in which
states are so distrustful that they make worst-case
assumptions about each other’s intentions, and as a
result define their interests in self-help terms. A security
community is a different social structure, one composed
of shared knowledge in which states trust one another
to resolve disputes without war. This dependence of
social structure on ideas is the sense in which
constructivism has an idealist view of structure.
SOCIAL
STRUCTURES
SHARED
KNOWLEDG
E
PRACTICES
MATERIAL
RESOURCES
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