Ted Hopf

Who is Ted Hopf?

Ted Hopf is an American academic and a leading figure in the constructivist school of international relations theory. He is currently a Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore.

Perhaps 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.

Hopf earned a B.A. from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1983. He earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 1989.