In a recent paper submitted to a prominent international affairs journal, I claimed that my approach ‘hewed to a constructivist way of thinking’. I made the point almost in passing, not giving it much thought. I should have known better.

The reviewers were quick to refute any association between what I was doing and ‘Social Constructivism’. Constructivism, they emphasized, focuses on the role of interaction in creating mutual identities in world politics, ‘or something along those lines’. My paper was on the topic of expert contestation in the making of US national security policy. It explored the intermingling of political struggles over the framing of America's national interest vis-a-vis a major power competitor with professional competition over the nature of foreign policy expertise. One reviewer pointed out, quite correctly, that Constructivism is not concerned with beliefs and ideas alone, factors important in the story I was telling. Since identity making in interaction was explicitly absent from the piece, both reviewers concluded that a claim about its constructivist pedigree should be removed.

To me at least, the paper was unambiguously constructivist. I was not adopting a realist perspective, one focused on the supposed verities of power politics, whether in a classical – prudential or realpolitik– or structural guise. Equally, the paper was not rationalist in its research design. It did not picture policy-making as an effort at utility maximization within a bargaining game – whether with a full-or partial-information game. Finally, the paper was not an exercise in critical or post-modernist theorizing. Despite the Gramscian overtones of its focus on America's policy-making elites, the paper was not trying to unmask hidden power structures in society with the aim of helping overturn them. Rather, the paper was an explanatory exercise – in a broad understanding of the word – aimed at accounting for the effects of professional contestation on discursive representations of the United States in world politics. It was about how the world was constructed and the social world(s) of those doing the constructing – the experts and policy-makers. It all seemed solidly constructivist fair to me.

Again, I should have known better. The politics of Constructivism as an approach in International Relations (IR) theory are often fraught, and frequently downright hostile. At least the reviewers in question were polite about it. And they were quick.