Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999

by Ted Hopf

Release Date: October, 2002

Edition: Paperback

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winner of the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize

Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 & 1999, by Ted Hopf, published by Cornell University Press was a co-winner of the 2003 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, awarded by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University.

The Shulman book prize is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.

The other winner was Bertrand M. Patenaude, for The Big Show in Bololand: The American Relief Expedition to Soviet Russia in the Famine of 1921, published by Stanford University Press.

The book prize committee wrote the following: Ted Hopf's Social Construction of International Politics cuts across the disciplines of international relations, comparative politics, and area studies in a remarkable exploration of the sources of Soviet/Russian foreign policy behavior. He skillfully links theories of identity and social construction to debunk rational choice and neorealist claims regarding the way the international system works. State behavior, Hopf argues, emerges through a multifaceted prism of substate actors's intricately constructed and sometimes clashing notions of their own societal identity. His convincingly chosen case studies, the Soviet Union of 1955 and Russia in 1999, draw on an astonishingly broad and innovative set of source materials: not just archives, but also film reviews, popular novels, ethnographic journals, and even a systematic analysis of high school textbooks. Hopf's work is a model for area studies scholars wanting to make a rigorous contribution to the theoretical development of a traditional academic discipline, or for discipline-based scholars wanting to enjoy the rich and nuanced rewards of careful area study.