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.