Name Ted Hopf | ||
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Books Reconstructing the Cold War: The, Social construction of internat, Understandings of Russian foreign p, Peripheral Visions: Deterrenc | ||
Ted Hopf (born 1959) is an American academic and a leading figure in constructivism in international relations theory. He is currently a Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
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Education and career
Hopf earned a bachelor of arts from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1983. In 1989 he earned a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.
Previously he taught at Ohio State University, Ohio University, and the University of Michigan.
Scholarship
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.
He has authored or edited five books. His 2002 Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999, published by Cornell University Press won the Marshall D. Shulman Award, presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, for the best book of 2003 on the international politics of the former Soviet Union and Central Europe. In April 2012, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958, was published by Oxford University Press.