Description
The discipline of IR and its underlying concepts deserve critique for being overly simplistic and static, unable to tell us much about a complex social reality. The future of International Studies thus lies in adding philosophical and psychological meaning to IR concepts, or in other words, in taking social constructivism seriously. Crucial with this is to rigorously apply existing, interdisciplinary insights on identity and behaviour to International Relations.
This paper suggests one such route: To rectify the rather static and path-dependent identity-behaviour nexus posited by the ontological security scholarship, it suggests to place the interdisciplinary ‘collective memory’ concept at the basis of IR’s identity term. With this, a strong temporal dimension is introduced into the identity concept. In positing that collective memory is at the root of a country’s identity, this paper finds that it forms state behaviour in dynamic and open ways through past, present and future. Fusing collective memory with IR’s identity concept furthermore not only proposes a new way for constructivists to show how identity forms behaviour but also how it lies at the basis of normative action, structuring a country’s value system.
