Ted Hopf

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).

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.

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.

• "The Promise of Constructivism in International Relations Theory", International Security 23 (1) (Summer 1998) pp. 171–200
• Social Construction of International Politics: Identities and Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002)
• "The Logic of Habit in IR Theory", European Journal of International Relations, December 2010
• Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)