| Review of: |
Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities: The Social Construction of Realism and Liberalism by David L. Rousseau
Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2006
Pages: 296. $55.00 |
| Reviewed By: |
Vaughn P. Shannon |
| Reviewed in: |
International Studies Review |
| Date accepted online: |
10/04/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 09, Issue 02, Pages 259-261 |
Threat Perception and the Psychology of Constructivism
David Rousseau has accomplished a feat of grand proportions in his book, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities: The Social Construction of Realism and Liberalism. In eight succinct chapters and just under 300 pages, Rousseau presents a model of identity formation that explains threat perception and employs experimentation, simulation, and case study approaches to test the model. The effort is more ambitious than the book's title implies. Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities is a clear and definitive statement of a social psychological theory of international relations that is worthy of treatment alongside the works of Kenneth Waltz, Robert Keohane, and Alexander Wendt. Even though it has many limits and leaves a number of questions unanswered, this book is an important theoretical and empirical work for international relations theorists and security scholars alike.
In Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities, Rousseau addresses four sets of questions: (1) how do individuals define members of the "ingroup," and how do they treat "outgroups"; (2) how do individuals construct beliefs and opinions; (3) how do ideas spread throughout a population, and when do they become hegemonic; and (4) how do societies differ in the construction of threats? Rousseau reviews the threat perception literature from realist, liberal, and constructivist standpoints (Chapters 2 and 3). He then introduces a "construction of threat model" aimed at answering the four sets of questions and demonstrating when realist and liberal predictions are correct.
Rousseau's model is premised on psychological insights regarding ingroup-out-group dynamics, which suggest that threat perception is a function of whether the other is seen as similar to you or different. Rousseau hypothesizes that the construction of "self" and "other" is based on prior values and beliefs, but that such constructs are subject to manipulation. He hypothesizes that identities are changed through social interaction. He offers three mechanisms that influence the diffusion process: political entrepreneurs, the media, and the porousness of a country's borders along with its level of globalization. In short, political actors and the media offer conceptions of identity and prime people to think about countries in certain ways, affecting people's sense of threat. More open countries are exposed to more ideas and conceptions.
However, Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities is not just an innovative theoretical treatise. Chapters 5-7 apply the construction of threat model using laboratory experiments to explore individual-level constructions, computer simulations to explore idea diffusion, and a case study of US and Japanese citizens' views of the rise of China. From his experiments with US subjects, Rousseau finds that a sense of shared identity was negatively correlated with threat perception. He also confirms that perceptions of shared identity and threat were manipulable and that these manipulations altered the willingness of subjects to cooperate with China. Rousseau's computer simulation involves a population of "agents" interacting in a domestic society or "landscape"; we can think of each agent as a person and the landscape as a domestic society. The agents possess beliefs and values that are modified through interaction with other agents, creating a structure that subsequently constrains and shapes the actions of individual agents. Based on different iterations and tests of the simulation, Rousseau finds that the greater the number of identity dimensions in an actor's repertoire, the less likely that actor is to identify completely (positively or negatively) with the "other." Furthermore, a unified political elite can shape mass opinion whereas a deeply split political elite will trigger a polarization at the mass level. He further shows that media channels have a powerful impact on the emergence of a shared identity.
No doubt anticipating skepticism about results based solely on a computer simulation and laboratory experiments involving college undergraduates, Rousseau adds a comparative case study of US and Japanese attitudes toward China. Rousseau's analysis of these perceptions produces some empirical support for realism and liberalism, but in so doing it confirms the power of his constructivist argument. He notes that, in contrast to realist predictions, China has not aggressively balanced against the United States, nor has Japan balanced against China (or against the United States for that matter) despite China's rising military and economic power. Nor, he continues, has the United States moved to contain a rising China, preferring a liberal engagement strategy. In the realm of public opinion, on which his overall model concentrates, data indicate that the perception of a Chinese threat has grown in the United States, but they also suggest that this perception is related to a change in the perception of identity rather than a change in the perception of power. Rousseau claims that his findings corroborate the computer simulation by demonstrating that media concentration and elite polarization explain the relative consensus in Japan and the deep split in opinion within the United States regarding the Chinese threat.
Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities is a good and important book. Of course, suggesting that threats are subjective or variable is not a new idea. These themes have been the subject of analyses for decades in the areas of images and perceptions. But Rousseau's systematic critique of the major paradigms on threat perception and his methodical elaboration of the processes of identity formation add new insights and inspiration for theorizing about how such images and perceptions might originate and change.
Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities also contains some minor infractions and questionable aspects that will induce skepticism. Rousseau's use of experimentation, subject pools of college undergraduates, and computer simulations to test the model will raise the usual concerns about validity. Moreover, as a study of public attitudes, its relevance depends on the significance of public opinion to foreign policymaking, a highly debatable assertion. Finally, as an ideational theory of subjectivity, it is not clear what role material factors might play, and what is or is not interpretation. At one point, Rousseau concedes that "threatening behavior by the other state," which he operationalizes in terms of such statements as "it attacks common neighbors" and "it attacks you," can "lead to an erosion of the sense of shared identity" (p. 65). However, this language belies his thesis because it suggests that the use of force is obviously and universally "threatening behavior." The point appears to be that what an attack is depends on theoretical assumptions. Some actors may welcome an attack on neighbors (after all, what if you hate your neighbor?) or even on their own country (what if you hate your present government-the argument that invaders will be "greeted as liberators"). The conundrum of the relationship of ideas to material factors is not resolved satisfactorily in this volume.
Nonetheless, Rousseau is clearly and openly constructivist. At the same time, his constructivism is neither liberal nor realist but, rather, psychological at root, with ingroup-outgroup dynamics and individuals at the center of the analysis. Constructivists will benefit from the lessons of political psychology that are contained in this volume regarding the microfoundations of identity, beliefs, and social behavior. Rousseau's analysis confirms the need for more dialogue between the ideational allies of political psychology and constructivism. Both groups of scholars offer an ontology of optimism about change that contrasts with the pessimism of realists, and both groups offer a more social and realistic depiction of politics that contrasts with rational choice and economic models of man. The fact that rationalist and realist models continue to return to the well of preferences and identity testifies to the significance of such variables and of paradigms established to address such variables.
Realists will benefit from Rousseau's elaboration on what has been one of their central security concerns: threat perception. Indeed, a welcome aspect of Rousseau's analysis is the overdue challenge to Stephen Walt's (1987) influential "balance of threat" formulation, which asserts that threat perception is not just a function of power but of "aggressive intentions" (pp. 10, 20-21). Rousseau rightly asks what exactly constitutes aggressive intentions, suggesting that such intentions are in the eye of the beholder and thus vary by audience. This argument brings the ideational variables of constructivism and psychology to the foreground. Yet, both realists and liberals must determine the validity of Rousseau's Lakatosian assertion that he has offered an original theory that also successfully explains their existing claims about international relations.
Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities gives a much needed and much overdue voice to the social psychological approach to international relations at a level competing with the major paradigms of realism, liberalism, and constructivism. It highlights the complementarity between psychology and constructivism, both of which focus on the role of ideational factors in explaining and giving meaning to the material world of mainstream international relations. The book highlights contingency and complexity in contrast to the parsimonious but incomplete paradigms of the mainstream field. This virtue is not without its price, however. Rousseau's numerous dense formulations of multilevel dynamics can be unwieldy at times. His graphs and tables in particular do not simplify or clarify the theory and findings as much or as intuitively as readers might hope or expect. In short, international politics is complex, and Identifying Threats and Threatening Identities, for good and ill, accurately captures that complexity.
