Professor Ted Hopf to deliver Kenneth N Waltz Annual Lecture

Professor Ted Hopf

Professor Ted Hopf

02 December 2015

Professor Ted Hopf, a leading global figure in International Relations, is to give the Kenneth N Waltz Annual Lecture entitled ‘Crimea is Ours!: a Discursive History’ on Thursday 3rd December at 6.00pm.

Hosted by the Department of International Politics in association with journal ‘International Relations’ the public lecture will be held in the Main Hall in the International Politics Building on the Penglais Campus at Aberystwyth University. 

Ted Hopf, currently Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore, is one of the most original and prominent contributors to constructivist theorising about international relations.  In particular, his work emphasises the domestic sources of state identity formation. This approach challenges systemic ('realist') explanations of foreign policy behaviour and personality-focused (diplomatic history) understandings. 

His empirical work involves detailed research into Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history. Among his many publications, exhibiting outstanding knowledge of both theory and history, are his acclaimed books Reconstructing the Cold War: the Early Years, 1945-1958 (the first of a trilogy covering the whole Cold War era), and Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow 1955 and 1999.

“Ted Hopf offers an empirically rich account of social identities and their impact on the Soviet/Russian foreign policies. His aim is to reconstruct the identities that formed discourses and social cognitive structures. He suggests searching at the level of domestic society and is therefore more concerned with material(s) constituting social cognitive structures than with specific foreign policies. This is not a common approach within the discipline, but it is well justified by the results Hopf presents”, said Dr Jan Ruzicka of the Department of International Politics about Hopf’s book Social Construction of International Politics.

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