The relationship between realism and constructivism in international relations (IR) theory is a fraught one. The two paradigmatic framings of IR are often understood, and taught, as being in opposition to each other. The relationship is also an important one. Realism and constructivism are two of the central concepts around which the academic discipline is organized. They are often presented as incompatible or paradigmatically irreconcilable, not only to most graduate students studying to be IR scholars, but also to most students in undergraduate introductory IR classes as well. This leads both scholars of IR and informed non-specialists more broadly to understand power politics on the one hand, and constructivist research foci such as norms, identity and discourse on the other, as incompatible and to engage in sterile debates about whether material power or discourses matter more. Assuming that realism and constructivism are mutually hostile understandings of how international politics work impoverishes both understandings; it takes away from realists the ability to study normative phenomena that matter to the conduct of power politics, and it limits constructivists’ ability to study power politics in the first place (Barkin 2010).

The mutual hostility of the two paradigms is easy to trace historically; some of the best-known early works of constructivism cast themselves either as critiques of particular realisms (eg Wendt 1999), or of a rationalist understanding of politics under which neorealism is subsumed (eg Ruggie 1998). However, these critiques are not really aimed at political realism in general, but rather at specific variants of neorealism. More recently a number of scholars have either proposed readings of classical realism that are compatible with constructivism or argued explicitly that the two are compatible (eg Sterling-Folker 2002; Steele 2007a; Steele 2007b; Barkin 2010). However, these discussions have tended to be at a theoretical rather than applied level; they have opened up spaces for discussions of the relationship between the two understandings, but they have not necessarily given clear guidance to scholars as to how to combine realism and constructivism as parts of a specific research design. In part this is because there are a variety of ways in which one could reasonably combine the two. Realist constructivism is in this sense a space for a conversation between the two paradigmatic understandings, rather than a specific combination of them.