Towards a Realistic Constructivist Framework for Analyzing International Relations from the Peripheries

This article aims to systematize and articulate, within a theoretical proposal, the problems emerging from the absence of a conceptual framework that can account for international economy, politics and security dynamics and processes of peripheral countries. The article presents a proposal of a conceptual and methodological framework called peripheral realist constructivism. This framework arises from the triangulation, within a systemic approach, of notions of realism and constructivism, tailored from a South’s view. Beginning with a basic typology, the analysis deployed here finds that the international system is the relational outcome (material and notional) of its component units: the system is co-constructed in different senses for central and peripheral agents. Then, the framework allows analyze the behavior of the units by understanding how perceptions of threat and benefit are generated at the systemic level. Finally, two analytical models are constructed for understanding political and economic dynamics that streamline associative dynamics in the peripheries.