Ted Hopf is an American academic and a leading figure in the contructivist school of international relations theory

Constructivism in international relations

In the discipline of international relations, constructivism is the claim that significant aspects of international relations are historically and socially contingent, rather than inevitable consequences of human nature or other essential characteristics of world politics.-Development:Nicholas Onuf...

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Perhaps his signature contribution to constructivism has been to bring the domestic into the theorization of how states acquire their identities. This provides a mid-range constructivism, below systemic, but avoiding the psychologism of individual levels of analysis. Hopf has also been a force in advocating the adoption of as many mainstream social science methodological techniques as possible so long as their adoption does not do violence to the interpretivist roots of constructivism. Most recently he has been exploring how habits contribute to a constructivist understanding of social order in world politics.

Selected Publications

• Hopf, Ted, "The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory," International Security, Vol 23, (No 1) (Summer 1998) pp. 171–200
• Hopf, Ted, Social Construction of International Politics (Cornell 2002)
• Hopf, Ted, "The Logic of Habit in IR Theory," European Journal of International Relations, December 2010
• Hopf, Ted, Reconstructing the Cold War (Oxford [forthcoming])