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